Biomedical subjects

Sabine Kowal

Publications and source records attributed to Sabine Kowal.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

The research status of Clayman and Heritage's (2002) "The news interview".

The databases of three books with almost identical titles are examined in order to throw light on the theory of neutralistic professionalism of news interviewers and on the empirical logic of the most recent of the three: "The news interview" by Steven Clayman and John Heritage (2002). Instead of a theory of neutralism, a theory of perspectivity that applies to both interviewer and interviewee is presented. The logic of Clayman and Heritage's arguments is found wanting in a number of respects: (a) their treatment of TV and radio interviews as if they were identical; (b) their treatment of news interviews in the United States and Great Britain as essentially the same in practices and ground rules; (c) their inferences from isolated excerpts to the structure of the news interview itself; (d) their very concept of the news interview as "an interactional encounter between a journalist and one or more newsworthy public figures" (p. 1). Inaccuracies in their database make it unsatisfactory as support for a theory of neutralistic professionalism. Despite these limitations, Clayman and Heritage provide an excellent overview of the recent history of the news interview in the United States and Britain and a wealth of information about the local organization of news interviews.

Humans↗

PubMed2005

Interjections in interviews.

A psycholinguistic hypothesis regarding the use of interjections in spoken utterances, originally formulated by Ameka (1992b, 1994) for the English language, but not confirmed in the German-language research of Kowal and O'Connell (2004 a & c), was tested: The local syntactic isolation of interjections is paralleled by their articulatory isolation in spoken utterances i.e., by their occurrence between a preceding and a following pause. The corpus consisted of four TV and two radio interviews of Hillary Clinton that had coincided with the publication of her book Living History (2003) and one TV interview of Robin Williams by James Lipton. No evidence was found for articulatory isolation of English-language interjections. In the Hillary Clinton interviews and Robin Williams interviews, respectively, 71% and 73% of all interjections occurred initially, i.e., at the onset of various units of spoken discourse: at the beginning of turns; at the beginning of articulatory phrases within turns, i.e., after a preceding pause; and at the beginning of a citation within a turn (either Direct Reported Speech [DRS] or what we have designated Hypothetical Speaker Formulation [HSF]. One conventional interjection (OH) occurred most frequently. The Robin Williams interview had a much higher occurrence of interjections, especially nonconventional ones, than the Hillary Clinton interviews had. It is suggested that the onset or initializing role of interjections reflects the temporal priority of the affective and the intuitive over the analytic, grammatical, and cognitive in speech production. Both this temporal priority and the spontaneous and emotional use of interjections are consonant with Wundt's (1900) characterization of the primary interjection as psychologically primitive. The interjection is indeed the purest verbal implementation of conceptual orality.

Electronic Data Processing↗

PubMed2005

Where do interjections come from? A psycholinguistic analysis of Shaw's Pygmalion.

Starting from our recent findings regarding emotional and initializing functions of interjections in TV and radio interviews (Kowal & O'Connell, 2004b; O'Connell & Kowal, in press; O'Connell, Kowal, & Ageneau, 2005), we used the book and script of Shaw (1916/1969) and the audiotape of the motion picture (Pascal, Asquith, & Howard, 1938) Pygmalion to investigate how actors use interjections to express emotions. The following hypotheses were tested: (1) The actors use the written cues selectively in their oral performance by substituting, adding, and deleting interjections; (2) primary interjections added by the actors are less conventional than those in the written text; (3) durations and number of syllables of Eliza Doolittle's spoken renditions of her signature interjection ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo do not correlate with the length in letters and syllables of the written versions; and (4) there is no evidence for Ameka's (1992b, 1994) characterization of interjections as temporally isolated, i.e., preceded and followed by silent pauses, in consequence of their syntactic isolation. Our findings confirmed all the hypotheses except for one unexpectedly significant correlation between number of syllables in Eliza Doolittle's signature interjection in the written version and duration in seconds of the spoken version thereof. The common thread throughout these data is the actor's need to personalize emotions in a dramatic performance--by means of interjections other than those provided in the written text. In this process of personalization, the emotional and initializing functions of interjections are confirmed.

Affect↗

PubMed2005

Uh and um revisited: are they interjections for signaling delay?

Clark and Fox Tree (2002) have presented empirical evidence, based primarily on the London-Lund corpus (LL; Svartvik & Quirk, 1980), that the fillers uh and um are conventional English words that signal a speaker's intention to initiate a minor and a major delay, respectively. We present here empirical analyses of uh and um and of silent pauses (delays) immediately following them in six media interviews of Hillary Clinton. Our evidence indicates that uh and um cannot serve as signals of upcoming delay, let alone signal it differentially: In most cases, both uh and um were not followed by a silent pause, that is, there was no delay at all; the silent pauses that did occur after um were too short to be counted as major delays; finally, the distributions of durations of silent pauses after uh and um were almost entirely overlapping and could therefore not have served as reliable predictors for a listener. The discrepancies between Clark and Fox Tree's findings and ours are largely a consequence of the fact that their LL analyses reflect the perceptions of professional coders, whereas our data were analyzed by means of acoustic measurements with the PRAAT software (www.praat.org). A comparison of our findings with those of O'Connell, Kowal, and Ageneau (2005) did not corroborate the hypothesis of Clark and Fox Tree that uh and um are interjections: Fillers occurred typically in initial, interjections in medial positions; fillers did not constitute an integral turn by themselves, whereas interjections did; fillers never initiated cited speech, whereas interjections did; and fillers did not signal emotion, whereas interjections did. Clark and Fox Tree's analyses were embedded within a theory of ideal delivery that we find inappropriate for the explication of these phenomena.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

The history of research on the filled pause as evidence of the written language bias in linguistics (Linell, 1982).

Erard's (2004) publication in the New York Times of a journalistic history of the filled pause serves as the occasion for this critical review of the past half-century of research on the filled pause. Historically, the various phonetic realizations or instantiations of the filled pause have been presented with an odd recurrent admixture of the interjection ah. In addition, the filled pause has been consistently associated with both hesitation and disfluency. The present authors hold that such a mandatory association of the filled pause with disfluency is the product of The written language bias in linguistics [Linell, 1982] and disregards much cogent evidence to the contrary. The implicit prescriptivism of well formedness--a demand derived from literacy--must be rejected; literate well formedness is not a necessary or even typical property of spontaneous spoken discourse; its structures and functions--including those of the filled pause--are very different from those of written language The recent work of Clark and Fox Tree (2002) holds promise for moving the status of the filled pause not only toward that of a conventional word, but also toward its status as an interjection. This latter development is also being fostered by lexicographers. Nonetheless, in view of ongoing research regarding the disparate privileges of occurrence and functions of filled pauses in comparison with interjections, the present authors are reluctant to categorize the filled pause as an interjection.

History, 20th Century↗

PubMed2003

Psycholinguistics: a half century of monologism.

The contention of this article is that, since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, mainstream psycholinguistics has been monologistic, that is, has concentrated on monologue as its source of empirical material and has, largely implicitly, involved a monologistic epistemology. The article is not a comprehensive history of psycholinguistics but does attempt to establish a historical perspective. Monologism has been the historical bias of Cartesianism, positivism, behaviorism, and cognitivism. Monologism is concerned only with the person in whom cognition takes place and from whom communication proceeds. It is essentially asocial. By contrast, the merits of dialogism include an openness to the sociocultural, interactive nature of all cognition and communication and an empirical engagement of contextualized discourse situations. Dialogism is presented here not as a supplement to mainstream psycholinguistics but as a radical innovation that construes mainstream psycholinguistics as "strongly misleading if presented as a full theory of communication through spoken interaction" (Linell, 1998, p. 23). Some approaches to dialogism and research on dialogue are critically reviewed.

Cognition↗

PubMed2002

"If you and I, if we, in this later day, lose that sacred fire . . .": perspective in political interviews.

It is argued in the following that the dialogical complexity of speaker perspective requires a broad empirical analysis. To date, such analyses, particularly of political discourse, have been couched in terms of narrower concepts, such as self-presentation and political positioning or involvement/distancing, and have been typically carried out by means of qualitative methods applied to pronominal usage. The present research applies complementarily both quantitative and qualitative analyses to BBC television interviews of Shimon Peres (January 29, 2001) and of Edward Said (October 18, 2000) by Tim Sebastian in a program entitled HARDtalk. In addition to pronouns, these analyses include a number of other hypothetical indicators of a broad concept of perspective on the part of both interviewer and interviewees: turn-initial words, hesitations, questions, use of yes and no, personal reference utterances (e.g., I think), interjections, number of syllables spoken, and interruptions and overlaps. Quantitative comparisons of interviewer with interviewee revealed important differences on all these measures. Qualitative analyses also confirmed subtle local dynamics of perspective. Accordingly, the findings are interpreted within a general theoretical concept of perspective, derived from Bakhtin's (1981) dialogicity.

Dominance-Subordination↗

PubMed2002

Notation systems for transcription: an empirical investigation.

A 21-syllable question posed by Bernard Shaw in a CNN television interview with Margaret Thatcher was presented to 90 participants, either as an audio recording or as a typed transcript or as both. Participants were asked to speak it, as closely as possible, as Shaw had (or, in conditions without the audio recording, as he might have). The typed version was either an ordinary transcript or a transcript in one of three transcription systems used currently in research on spoken discourse, all of which incorporate notations for prosody. Hence, there were nine conditions in all, with five women and five men in each. Contrary to the experimental hypothesis, approximations to Shaw's original temporal measures of performance were not degraded but were instead improved significantly by the addition of a prosodically notated transcript to the audio recording and significantly more in the absence of the audio recording. Presentation of the ordinary transcript alone produced the worst approximation to Shaw's temporal measures. The usefulness, accuracy, and readability of transcripts prepared according to detailed notation systems are discussed.

Adult↗