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UNDERSTANDING SPOKEN DISCOURSE:

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UNDERSTANDING SPOKEN DISCOURSE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF THREE INFORMATION CHANNELS Andrej A. Kibrik (Institute of Linguistics RAN) Ekaterina M. El bert (CJSC GLITNIR ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: UNDERSTANDING SPOKEN DISCOURSE:


1
UNDERSTANDING SPOKEN DISCOURSE THE CONTRIBUTION
OF THREE INFORMATION CHANNELS
Andrej A. Kibrik (Institute of Linguistics RAN)
Ekaterina M. Elbert (CJSC GLITNIR Securities )
Background
Experiment
Material Russian TV serial Tajny sledstvija
Mysteries of the investigation (3 min. 20 sec.
long), preceded by a 8 minutes context (that
starts from the beginning of the series). The
excerpt fully consists of a conversation, to
ensure that we are testing the understanding of
discourse rather than of the film in general.
  • Traditional point of view in linguistics (as well
    as in general psychology)
  • Language is ultimately segmental, or verbal.
  • Hierarchy of segmental units phonemes
    morphemes words phrases clauses
    sentences.
  • However
  • There are other kinds of encoding, or information
    channels, relevant for linguistic communication
  • Prosody, including (i)-(vii), conveys much
    information imagine listening to a conversation
    behind the wall
  • Pausing
  • Accents
  • Tone
  • Tempo
  • Register
  • Reduction
  • Phonations
  • Loudness
  • ............
  • Body language, including (i)-(iv), also
    constitutes an important visual channel
  • Method The three channels verbal, prosodic,
    and visual have been isolated from each other
    and presented in all possible combinations (8
    altogether).
  • The visual channel by itself is video alone
    (without sound)
  • The verbal channel is subtitles running in
    temporal alignment with the original film
  • The prosodic channel is the original audio
    component with a superimposed filter creating the
    effect of a conversation behind the wall.

Subjects 99 participants, divided into 8 groups.
¾ - women, ¼ - men. Native speakers of Russian.
Each group comprised 10 to 17 subjects
  • Procedure Every subject was instructed to watch
    the context and the experimental excerpt and then
    answer a set of questions concerned with the
    experimental excerpt alone. A subject was
    supposed to choose only one answer out of four
    listed variants.
  • 29 questions were originally included in
    questionnaire
  • But six were later discarded as either trivial or
    prone to guessing
  • 23 questions kept after the testing phase
  • Directions for subjects
  • Please watch an extract of a film (11 minutes)
    and answer a set questions related to the last
    portion of the extract
  • When answering questions, you need to choose only
    one of the four answers
  • Questions are printed on separate sheets of
    paper. After answering a question, please turn to
    the next sheet Correcting previous answers is not
    allowed
  • Please consider one question at a time, beginning
    from the first question


Example of a question
What Tamara Stepanovna offers Masha before the
beginning of the conversation a. to take
off her coat b. to have a cup of tea ? c.
to have a seat d. to have a drink
Examples of experimental material Full variant
VerbalVisual Verbal
??, ???????, ????? ????, ??? ????????
???????????????
Results - the mean percentage of correct
answers in each of the eight experimental groups
Group number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Experimental material Original Sound Subtitlesvideo Prosodyvideo Subtitles Prosody Video Nothing (context only)
Information channels verbal prosodic visual verbal prosodic verbal visual prosodic visual verbal prosodic visual none
Mean of correct answers 87,4 70,4 73,9 51,2 72,0 51,1 61,7 38,3
Discussion
  • Each of the three information channels, taken in
    isolation, is quite informative. The percentages
    in groups 5 through 7 are significantly higher
    than the percentage in group 8.
  • The hierarchy of informativeness can be
    represented as follows verbal gt visual gt
    prosodic.
  • Combining the verbal channel with one additional
    channel does not increase the percentage of
    correct answers (compare group 5 with groups 2
    and 3). Only inclusion of all three channels
    (group 1) yields significantly better results
    than the verbal channel by itself (group 5).
  • Adding the visual channel to the prosodic channel
    does not result in increase in correct answers
    (compare group 6 with group 4).
  • The combination prosodic plus visual (group 4)
    displays significantly lower result than in other
    pairs of channels (groups 2 and 3). Evidently,
    this combination is not customary for subjects,
    and they have trouble integrating information
    from prosody and video.
  • The relative contribution of the three channels
  • Assuming, for the sake of simplicity, that all
    three channels are independent,
  • (725162185)/100
  • Results
  • Verbal channel 39 (721.8539),
  • Prosodic channel 28 (51,11.8528),
  • Visual channel 33 (61,71.8533),

39
Conclusions
  • All information channels are highly significant ?
    the traditional linguistic viewpoint is
    erroneous.
  • The verbal channel is the leading one ? the
    viewpoint popular in applied psychology is
    erroneous.
  • Information from the prosodic and the visual
    channels is primarily used through integration
    with the verbal channel.

Further Directions
  • More natural discourse material, such as usual
    conversation
  • Further improvement of the questionnaire
  • Main criterion increase the delta of correct
    answers between groups 1 and 8 the current
    difference between 38 and 87 is insufficient
  • Construction of a statistical model, assessing
    the relative contribution of channels, including
    possible relationships between channels
  • Search for correlation between type of question
    and information channel

Acknowledgements O.V.Fedorova, S.A.Krejchi,
O.F.Krivnova, A.V.Proxorov, E.A.Iljushina, S.
Lando
Ekaterina_elbert_at_inbox.ru
Poster presented at the Cogsci 2008, Moscow,
Russia, June 20-25
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