Reactions to second language speech

This study investigates how Mandarin and Slavic language speakers’ comprehensibility, accentedness, and fluency ratings, as assigned by experienced teacher-raters and novice raters, align with discrete linguistic measures, and raters’ accounts of influences on their scoring. In addition to examining mean ratings in relation to rater experience and speaker first language background, we correlated ratings with segmental, prosodic, and temporal measures. Introspective reports were segmented, coded, enumerated, and submitted to loglinear analysis to elucidate influences on ratings. Results showed that ratings were strongly correlated with prosodic goodness and moderately correlated with segmental errors, implying the importance of both segmentals and prosody in L2 speech ratings. Experienced teacher-raters provided lengthier reports than novice raters, producing more comments for all coded categories where an error was identified except for pausing (a dysfluency marker). This may be because novice raters observed little else about the speech or struggled to pinpoint or articulate other features.

Operationalising construal

This study seeks to demonstrate that the Behavioural Profile Approach, specifically Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis (Geeraerts et al. 1994; Gries 2003), can be used to quantitatively describe lexico-grammatical construal (Langacker 1987; 1999). It examines the of – about constructional alternation for the complementation of cognition and communica-tion predicates. The predicates sampled include know, speak, talk, and think distributed across the two prepositions in British and American Eng-lish. In total, a sample of some 700 occurrences are analysed; the annota-tion schema is based on previous literature in the field (Radden 1981; Rudzka-Ostyn 2003; Dirven 2003; Lindstromberg 2010). Using a combi-nation of mixed-effects logistic regression, multiple correspondence analysis, and loglinear analysis, the study is able to successfully identify a behavioural profile of the two alternations, which can be interpreted as an operationalisation of the opposing construals. Although distinct pro-files are obtained, an adequate means for separating the conceptual con-tribution of the predicate and the complement will require further investi-gation.

Quantitative metaphor usage patterns in Chinese psychotherapy talk

The study of metaphor in psychotherapy is undergoing a ‘contextual turn’, shifting emphasis from global mechanisms underlying metaphors and therapeutic change to their naturally occurring properties in therapist–patient interaction. While there have been rich qualitative and contextual descriptions of metaphors in psychotherapy, complementary quantitative accounts of metaphor usage patterns over larger amounts of talk have been less forthcoming. This paper reports metaphor usage patterns as associations between key contextual variables which characterize metaphors in a dataset of Chinese psychotherapy talk. A total of 2893 metaphor vehicle terms from 29.5 hours of talk were coded for SPEAKER, FUNCTION, TARGET, PHASE OF THERAPY, and DYAD. A loglinear analysis revealed significant higher order associations (DYAD*TARGET*FUNCTION*PHASE; DYAD*FUNCTION*PHASE*SPEAKER; TARGET*FUNCTION*SPEAKER), discussed as usage patterns which bear implications for the psychotherapeutic application of metaphor. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

A GIS-Based Environmental Justice Analysis of Ambient Air Pollution: a Comparison between Urban and Rural Areas

Using general loglinear analysis and GIS spatial analysis, we evaluated the socio-economic inequities in exposure to SO2 in the urban and rural areas at census scale. The results show that differences of exposure inequities among socioeconomic groups exist in the urban and rural areas. Further studies are needed to analyze the impacts of scales and statistical methods on the accuracy of air pollution exposure justice assessment.