Narrative Flashcards
Discourse
Speech structured at its highest level. A set of sentences that cohere about one or more related topics
two types of discourse
Narratives and conversation
Conversation
Periods of turn-taking as listener and speaker
Narratives
Periods when one speaker dominates
Talk-in-interaction
Spontaneous speech people use as they engage in joint activities
Conversational Fillers
Um, uh and like (I use “OK” a lot)
Pragmatics
The various ways that context contributes to the meaning of a discourse
Common Ground
A pool of information that all participants in a conversation share
Interlocuters
Participants in a conversation
Turn-Constructional Unit
A syntactic structure, ranging from a single word to a sentence, that can make up a turn in a conversation.
Transition Relevance Place
A point in the conversation where the listener can expect the current speaker to end a turn.
Principle of No Gaps/Overlaps
The tendency to avoid leaving a noticeable silence between turns of conversation and beginning a new turn before the current turn is finished.
Backchannels
Signals like “mmmhmm” and “uhhuh”, from the listener that indicate engagement and encourage the speaker to continue.
Overlaps
Instances when multiple interlocuters speak at the same time
When are overlaps most often used and why
Often during greeting to express heightened emotion or to finish another persons sentence to express engagement and affiliation.
Describe the three steps of conversational turn allocation
Speaker selects next
Listener selects self
Speaker selects self
Beat
The length of time it takes to produce a syllable, as set by the speaking rate of the last turn.
Entrainment
The synchronization of rhythmic behavior in social interactions.
Narrative
A form of discourse in which one participant dominates as the active speaker while the other participants assume passive roles as listeners.
Spouse Talk
Couples recount past experiences together as a way to reminisce and bond.
Decontextualization
The distancing of thought, language and behavior from the current situation.
What executive functions are important for story telling?
Memory allocation, planning, inhibition, and other cognitive processes necessary for guiding intentional behavior.
Story Grammar
The framework guiding the presentation of events and characters in a narrative.
Episode
The fundamental building block of a story
7 parts of an episode
Setting, Initiating Event, Internal Response
Attempt, Consequence, Reaction
Schema
A mental framework for organizing our understanding of how some aspect of the world works.
Situation Model
A mental representation of the entities and events in a story and how they are related.
Referring Expression
A word or phrase that is used to represent a particular entity or event.
Referent
The entity that is represented by a particular word or phrase
Reference
The process of using a word or phrase to represent an entity
Privileged Ground
Information that one interlocuter knows but the other one doesn’t
Relevance Theory
The proposal that speakers strive for a balance between providing too much and too little information in choosing referring expressions.
Anaphor
A word or phrase that refers back to a previously mentioned entity in the discourse.
Antecedent
The entity in the discourse that an anaphor refers back to
Anaphora
The process of referring back to an antecedent.
Category Anaphor
A noun phrase anaphor that names the category that the antecedent is a member of (e.g., ‘The girl’)
Zero Anaphor
The case in which no overt anaphor is used even though anaphoric reference can easily be inferred
Givenness
The degree to which an antecedent is likely to be within the memory and attention span of the listener.
What is the relationship between anaphors and givenness?
More givenness, pronoun or zero anaphor
Less givenness, noun anaphor or full antecedent
Unheralded Pronoun
A pronoun without an antecedent
In talk-in-interaction or when the referent is unimportant or obvious from the context
Coherence
The use of schemas and logical relations to bind the sentences of a discourse together.
Cohesion
The use of linguistic devices to tie together the sentences of a discourse.
Bridging Inference
The use of logic or real-world experience to fill in gaps in a discourse.
Predictive Inference
An expectation of what comes next in a discourse based on the sequence of events so far.
Theory of Mind
The ability to make inferences about the mental states and intentions of others.
Speech Act Theory
The position that the value of an utterance lies not in the literal meaning of its words but rather in the intention of the speaker and the effect it has on the listener.
three layers of meaning within an utterance
1) Locution
The literal meaning of the utterance
2) Illocution
The speaker’s intended meaning behind the utterance
3) Perlocution
The listener’s perception of the speaker’s intended meaning
Indirect Speech Act
An utterance whose literal and intended messages are not the same.
Cooperative Principle
The proposal that speakers should follow social norms to tailor their utterances to fit the current needs of the conversation.
Gricean Maxims
Aspects of a speaker’s utterance that the listener attends to in deciding whether to accept the statement at face value.
4 Gricean Maxims
Quality: Be truthful
Quantity: Give just enough information
Relevance: Stay on topic
Manner: Be clear and unambiguous
By what age are infants already coordinating behavior within face to face interactions
2 months
Perturbation Paradigm
An experimental procedure that disrupts normal infant-caregiver interaction to observe the infant’s response.
Still Face Paradigm
after three minutes of “interaction” with a non-responsive expressionless mother, “rapidly sobers and grows wary
Developmental Language Delay
A condition marked by slower than normal development of expressive language during the first few years of life, even though hearing, motor, and cognitive functions are otherwise in the normal range.
Ellipsis
The deletion of sentence elements that can be inferred from context.
4 conversation difficulties of children with language delays
Reduced content within turns
Tend to use ellipsis
More use of pointing
Overreliance on formulaic expressions
three different response strategies that mothers use in response to the depleted content of their “Late Talker” children
High control strategy-directing the flow of topics and commenting more on the child’s meager utterances
Less responsive strategy-less responsive to the child’s attempts at utterances, shifting the topic instead toward their own interests.
High sensitivity strategy-high sensitivity to the interests of the child and follows up on conversational topics the child proposes.
Indexical Gesture
Movement of an upper limb to point out a referent in a conversation.
Iconic Gesture
Movement of one or both upper limbs to imitate an action.
Co-speech Gestures
Hand movements that speakers make while they talk.
Prosody
Fluctuations in pitch, intensity, and syllable duration over the extent of an utterance, it’s perceived as tone of voice.
Sound Symbolism
Using your voice to convey meaning.
Lexical Bias
Tendency among children to rely on the literal meaning of an utterance even when prosody strongly suggests a nonliteral meaning. Shown by children under nine.
Scalar Implicature
A listener’s inference that the speaker’s use of a weaker term means that a stronger term is not true.
4 characteristics shown by children with specific language impairment (SLI) in conversation and narratives
Simple vocabulary
Simple sentence structure
Difficulty inferring the mental states of others
Problems using context cues to infer nonliteral interpretations of utterances
Pragmatic Impairment
A developmental disorder in which the child has structural language skills intact but still experiences difficulties with the social and contextual aspects of discourse, such as inferring nonliteral meanings of utterances.
