Browsing by Author "Pederson, Eric"
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Item Open Access Aviation English Is Distinct From Conversational English: Evidence From Prosodic Analyses And Listening Performance(University of Oregon, 2018-10-31) Trippe, Julia; Pederson, EricInternational aviation professionals converse in a register of English derived from postwar radiotelephony. Decades of use and regulatory pressure established Aviation English (AE) as the lingua franca for pilots and air traffic controllers. Recently, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) required aviation professionals prove AE proficiency, resulting in development of a variety of AE programs and tests derived from English language pedagogy, without accounting for unique aviation language requirements. This dissertation explores linguistic characteristics that must be accounted for in international AE programs. Historically, issues of English language dominance were sidestepped by letting speakers of regional languages use their own aviation jargon, allowing native English speakers (NESs) to claim AE proficiency without learning a language comprehensible to international AE users. By allowing limited “plain language” use, this practice paved the way for colloquial jargon that is often opaque to non-native English speakers (NNESs). This led to an ICAO requirement that international pilots and controllers have conversational English (CE) proficiency. A phonological examination of AE must begin by defining a baseline in comparison with other language forms. Regarding AE, it is critical to determine if there are differences with CE, because of the assumption of compatibility inherent in ICAO proficiency requirements. This dissertation compared AE with CE by examining the prosody and intelligibility of each language variety. Prosodic differences in AE and CE were examined in two radio corpora: air traffic controllers and radio newscasters. From these data I examined rhythm, intonation and speech rate differences that could affect intelligibility across registers. Using laboratory studies of pilot and non-pilot NESs and NNESs, I examined AE intelligibility differences based on language background. NNES pilots scored worse on CE tasks and better on AE tasks than NES non-pilots, indicating CE proficiency is not a predictor of AE proficiency. Dissertation findings suggest AE language training should focus on AE and not on CE, as is current practice. Given phonological and other differences between AE and CE, enlisting all AE users to learn and adhere to AE phraseology will save time and money in training and alleviate miscommunication and confusion in flight, potentially saving lives.Item Open Access Cross-modal reduction: Repetition of words and gestures(University of Oregon, 2017-05-01) Vajrabhaya, Prakaiwan; Pederson, EricThis dissertation examines speakers’ production of speech and representational gesture. It utilizes the Repetition Effect as the investigative tool. The Repetition Effect appears to vary by the tendency for some items to shorten when repeating, at least under the condition that speakers can primarily operate by their assumption of the state of knowledge of the listener. In speech, a highly conventionalized form of performance, word duration reduces within the same stretch of coherent discourse; then, it resets in the first mention of a new stretch of coherent discourse regardless of the state of knowledge to the speaker or the listener. Therefore, the Repetition Effect in speech is best analyzed as an automatic behavior triggered by discourse structure, rather than reflecting online changes in word accessibility for either interlocutor, be it for the speaker (Listener-neutral explanation) or for the listener (Listener-modeling explanation). The Repetition Effect in speech production in this dissertation will be accounted for within an exemplar model of the perception/production loop. However, in representational gestures, a much less conventionalized form of performance compared to speech, the Repetition Effect shows a different pattern. When speakers only operate by their assumption of the state of knowledge of the listener, without dynamic, appreciable listener feedback, they steadily reduce most types of representational gesture across tellings. Based on these results, it can be argued that representational gestures primarily serve as a part of speech production, rather than as communicative acts. That is, they are produced without regard to the novelty of the information to the listener, thus, consistent with the Listener-neutral explanation.Item Open Access The role of orienting attention for learning novel phonetic categories(Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, University of Oregon, 2002) Guion, Susan G.; Pederson, EricItem Open Access A Semantic Map Approach to English Articles (a, the, and Ø)(University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Butler, Brian; Pederson, EricThe three structural possibilities marking a noun with an English article are a, the, and Ø (the absence of an article). Although these structural possibilities are simple, they encode a multitude of semantic and pragmatic functions, and it is these complex form-function interactions that this study explores and explains using a semantic map model. The semantic map that is proposed contains three dimensions, which I refer to as Grammatical Number, Referentiality, and Discourse Mode. Each of these dimensions contains a number of further semantic values or pragmatic functions - which I will label "attributes" - that are implicated in English article choice. Various semantic map versions are tested and compared with a methodological approach that uses data collected in a controlled protocol from an elicited conversational discourse. The version that performed best is used as a basis for proposing a comprehensive semantic map that includes the following dimensions and dimensional attributes: a Number dimension with 3 attributes (singular, plural, and uncountable); a Referentiality dimension with 11 attributes, including 7 referential attributes that describe kinds of identifiability (proper names, shared lexis, shared speech situation, frame, current discourse, identifiable to speaker only ["new reference"], and identifiable to neither speaker nor listener [non-specific]) as well as 4 non-referential attributes (categorization, general non-referential expressions, finite verb [verb-object] "noun incorporation", and idioms); and a Discourse Mode dimension with 4 attributes (headline, immediacy, normal, and reintroducing). This model of English articles contributes to the field of research on articles as well as to the field of English language instruction and learning. In addition, it is suggested that the methodological paradigm used to test the semantic map model may be useful as an experimental paradigm for testing semantic maps of other constructions and languages.Item Open Access Temporal Relations of Verbal and Non-Verbal Behavior in Storytelling(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Stave, Matthew; Pederson, EricThis dissertation takes a ‘big data’ approach to analyzing a corpus of multimodal storytelling with the goal of providing data for researchers interested in developing more holistic models of production that integrate verbal and non-verbal behavior. Rather than approaching the data with a specific hypothesis in mind, I approach the data with a set of methods that analyze the temporal relationship between two behaviors and apply the methods to every single possible pair of behaviors. Rather than using the data to test hypotheses, I am using it to formulate them. The methods used in this dissertation examine covariation between behaviors (how much do two behaviors overlap with each other, and is this more or less likely than we would expect, given a random distribution of the two behaviors), the sequential patterns of behaviors (the multimodal n-grams of behaviors that are most strongly associated), and the frequency distribution of behavior boundaries (the timing of behavior onsets and offsets near other behavior onsets and offsets). The analyses examine all possible pairs of behaviors from four modalities (head gesture, manual gesture, eye-gaze, and speech), as well as looking within and across roles of speaker and listener. A list of testable hypotheses is given, based on the findings in the data.