Talker-listener attunements to speech events.

Number 983
Year 1995
Drawer 18
Entry Date 07/01/1998
Authors Fowler, C.A., and Levy, E.T.
Contact
Publication Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, 6, 305-328.
url http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0983.pdf
Abstract [Introduction] We begin by focusing on animal-environment mutuality, a topic also addressed by Paul Wohlmuth in his introduction. Human behavior generally is closely attuned to environmental constraints, but, of course it can exploit those constraints as well and even change some of them. Learning a skill (to adopt the example of the Introduction, learning highway driving) involves at once attuning to and exploiting environment and task constraints. What makes this mutual human-environment fit possible? We argue that, on the human side, fittedness to the environment is grounded in “perceptual realism.” That is, we argue that natural selection has shaped perceptual systems to serve an essential function of acquainting perceive/actors with their ecological niche. Thus, a “trajectory” of natural selection with regard of identity between components of the ecological niche and percepts of them, a relation that we call “parity.” Achievement of parity by perceivers depends both on properties of the environment and on properties of perceivers. In particular, in the environment, media, including light (for seeing), air (for hearing) and the perceiver’s own body (for touch), are causally structured objects and events in the ecological niche. Further, it tends to be the case that different properties of the niche structure these media in ways distinctive to themselves. Therefore, structure in a medium can serve as information for its casual source in the environment. For their part, perceivers are sensitive to structure in informational media: their perceptual systems respond to it and use it render knowledge of its source in the world. The world does not give itself to passive perceivers. Perceivers have to obtain their knowledge by means of exploration. Indeed, many of their activities are exploratory ones in which the explorer attunes to properties of the explored event or object. These activities can be seen as evidence of one aim (or, again, in the highway metaphor, “trajectory”) of perceivers’ actions, namely to achieve perceptual parity. We suggest next that perceptual realism makes communication possible, because communications are transmitted in part via perceptual systems. The necessity that, for the most part, perceiver/actors achieve parity in perception has shaped their perceptual systems in ways that make achievement of parity in communication a possibility as well. Here, parity is a relation of identity between the messages sent and received. For talkers and listeners, parity is possible because the fundamental primitives of spoken languages are articulatory. Accordingly, speaking involves activities of the vocal tract that are phonological components of the spoken message. Those activities causally structure the air in ways distinctive to themselves. Listeners’ auditory systems respond to and use the structure to render knowledge of those components of the message. In the ideal, parity is achieved. We and others find striking evidence for exploratory or attunement activities on the parts of participants in communicative exchanges that identify, as one of the trajectories of these exchanges, progress toward achievement of communicative parity. First, listeners’ behaviors may serve a role analogous perhaps to one role of signposts along the highway. That is, they serve as guides, here to the speaker in the service of communicative efficacy. For example, facial or verbal signs of puzzlement will lead the talker to say more; signs of wandering attention may prompt termination of an utterance. Other nonlinguistic patterns of communicative behavior-for example variations in vocal intensity and in patterns of pausing during speech-who evidence of “accommodation,” that is, of participants moving closer to each other on those dimensions in the course of an exchange and thereby getting on each other’s wavelength as it were. Finally, we see patterns of elaborations and reductions of coding material at different levels and kinds of descriptions of a communicative exchange and even at different time scales. This includes, when information is new and unfamiliar to a listener, the speaker using more words to express an idea, using manual gestures to accompany the words, and providing more intelligible utterances of those words. Compatibility, as information becomes well-known to a listener in the course of an exchange, speakers use more opaque and less intelligible utterances and fewer gestural accompaniments. Thus, participants in communicative exchanges evidence dynamic attunement throughout the exchange, in the service, we believe, of efficient achievement of communicable parity. Taking an aerial view of a highway reveals a “driving configuration.” Stepping back from communicative exchanges to observe the longer time scale of language change also reveals a dynamic configuration, one that is very much like that observed in the shorter time frame and more local context of a single communicative exchange. When words are coined to describe something new, transparent names are often selected (e.g., “automobile,” “videocassette recorder”) with the consequence that something about the word’s unfamiliar referent can be guessed from its name. However, when the items become well-known to members of a language community, opaque but more efficient names are used (in the examples, “car” and “VCR”). Similarly, but now in the articulatory, rather than lexical, domain, words that are highly familiar to members of a language community (e.g., “particular”) may be truncated (pronounced “p’ticular”) whereas words that are unfamiliar (“particulate”) are not. Accordingly, dynamic attunement occurs in the slower time scale of language change and in the large community of language users as it does more transiently and locally in conversation, and we assume that, here too, it occurs in the service of efficient achievement of communicative parity.
Notes There is no formal abstract.

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