Workshop for teachers

The University of Salford is hosting a workshop for English Language teachers in April. Organised by Sue Fox and Heike Pichler, it looks like covering a range of really interesting material for teachers who are keen to keep up with recent developments in spoken language analysis and digital corpora.

More details can be found here, and Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox's Linguistics Research Digest, which runs regular updates about recent linguistic research, can be found here.

Convergence in action in Australia

There's a neat example here of how accommodation theory can work. When Barack Obama visited Australia he used a few Australianisms to help strike up a rapport with prime minister, Julia Gillard.

Accommodation theory, as theorised by Howard Giles, consists of convergence and divergence, the former involving speakers moving closer to each other in speech style (for example, a teacher downwardly converging with a younger student to speak more on their level), the latter showing the opposite (for example, a speaker deliberately altering their speech style to be more noticeably different from those around her).

Get a room

The language of lovers is often pretty sickening. It's even worse when you hear it murmured into a hands free mobile by the lovestruck man sitting next to you on a train, like I had to put up with this morning. But it's not just the babytalk-style phonology, or the wrinkling of the nose, or even the giggles of love, it's the vocabulary as well: snugglebunny, lickle lovebucket, poo poo poppet and agreeable bitch, being some examples. Actually the last two aren't his (and neither are the first two, to be fair) but Jonathan Swift's.

Now, some research  from psychologists in the USA suggests that people are attracted to those who have similar speech patterns. That may not be particularly surprising (unless you're Paula Abdul) but what's quite interesting about this is that the patterns seems to apply to online style as well as as spoken.

Research by the same team at the University of Texas has also indicated that language style matching (LSM) is apparent between couples when they're at their happiest in a relationship.

This is related to accommodation theory in sociolinguistics, where people change their speech style to either converge towards or diverge from other speakers around them. The extremes of divergence are noticeable in teenagers when they sometimes make deliberate efforts to avoid the speech styles of their parents, or in students with strong regional dialects who make a conscious effort not to blend in when they live in a different area, but it's not really much of a surprise to find that the closer we are emotionally, the closer we get linguistically.

This could make an interesting Language Investigation at A2: recording conversations between people who have been together for different lengths of time and identifying specific linguistic features that match or don't match.

Filling column inches

No, not another spam email about "manhood enhancement", but a quick piece about fillers. You know, like...err fillers yeah? Ha ha, can you see what I did there? Sorry...

Anyway, The Daily Telegraph (which is normally really good on language stories) has this terrible non-story about how English language speakers use loads of fillers and how this reflects a lack of care for our language. According to Phillip Hodson, speech expert and Fellow for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (who may have been selectively quoted, it has to be said):

It seems to me that the Anglo Saxon countries - Britain and America - are the worst for using these filler words to pad out our conversations. I think it is because unlike other countries like France we do not protect our language. There is little teaching of best practice. Some say that fillers are a sign of intellect, used to consider what to say next. However, research shows that if your speech is full of padding, you’re harder to understand, which makes listeners tend to tune out.

Erm, not exactly true though is it? Fillers are just normal parts of our spoken language; we use them as a form of punctuation for the most part, and it's not really true that we associate fillers with padding and a lack of clarity. In fact, this piece of research suggests that fillers, hedges and indirect constructions actually make us more convincing in some situations, more human and likeable even.

Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language

Big brother is listening to you...

Can you tell that someone is lying to you from the way they talk? Birmingham City Council seem to think so and they're installing new Voice Risk Analysis software at their call centres dealing with unemployment benefits. According to this article on the BBC news website:

It works by measuring "micro-changes" to the frequency of the human voice and relaying to the operator, in real time, the level of risk that the speaker is being deceptive. At the start of the conversation, the software takes the caller's normal voice as the benchmark and accounts for the possibility that changes may be caused by nerves. If the caller is deemed by the operator to be low risk, using the test results to support their own judgement, they are fast-tracked and avoid more rigorous vetting. Those deemed to be at higher risk of lying must supply further evidence to support their claim.

So, is it a step forward in protecting honest tax payers' cash, or a decidedly dodgy attempt to jail the nervous?

Useful for:
ENA3 - spoken language