<p> The framework of Optimality Theory has been recently used to develop constraint-based approaches to the analysis of speech patterns produced by children with phonological disorders. A significant benefit of this type of nonlinear analysis is the power to predict interword and intraword variability of phonological productions. Such variability, also known as inconsistency, is a speech characteristic frequently cited by researchers and clinicians as one that (a) critically aids in differentially diagnosing childhood apraxia of speech and (b) supports the theoretical perspective that childhood apraxia of speech is a motor speech disorder. This study applies a constraint-based approach to the phonological analysis of the speech of a single child suspected to present with childhood apraxia of speech. Transcriptions of the participant's speech were obtained from therapy notes written by the clinicians providing his speech services. A thorough phonological analysis of the sample was performed yielding a consonant inventory, two quantitative measurements of variability, and several constraint-based predictions of variability at the segmental and prosodic levels. The results of this study confirm variability as a characteristic of this child's speech. Relatively common and rare variations were successfully predicted by a phonological constraint hierarchy, revealing a rule-based deficit discordant with the theoretical perspective that childhood apraxia of speech is a pure motor speech disorder. It is suggested that the results presented in this study indicate a breakdown in the transformational stage of speech production similar to that of phonological disorders. Implications of this theoretical perspective for future research and clinical practice are discussed. </p>

<p> The study investigated the relationship between perceived levels of positive and negative employee interpersonal communication and morale within a large public school system in Tennessee (<i>N</i> = 714) using the Workplace Morale Questionnaire. Correlational research during Phase 1 (<i>n</i> = 187), using Pearson <i>r</i> tests and qualitative data, suggested significance among all findings, including a strong, direct relationship between expressed appreciation and morale; strong, indirect relationship between backbiting and morale. Pre-experimental, one-group pretest/posttest research, during Phase 2 (in-service, <i>n</i> = 48; two-month challenge, <i> n</i> = 54; follow-up survey, <i>n</i> = 291), using qualitative data, chi square and independent samples <i>t</i> tests, examined whether changes in employee interpersonal communication altered perceived levels of morale, suggesting no difference based on condition.</p>

<p> This thesis presents an examination of the relationship between psychological safety and relational coordination within interdisciplinary health care teams. Based on previous research, a model is proposed in which psychological safety&mdash;the perceived safety of interpersonal interaction&mdash;partially mediates the link between the relational dimensions&mdash;shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect&mdash;and the communication dimensions&mdash;frequent, accurate, timely, and solution-oriented communication&mdash;of relational coordination. The proposed model was tested using multiple linear regression of survey data from 158 obstetricians, anesthesiologists, and nurses who work in the labor and delivery units at two large teaching hospitals. The findings do not support the proposed model; however, an alternative model in which psychological safety is an antecedent to rather than a consequence of relational quality is well supported. Building on these findings, the potential existence and nature of a new cluster of relationship-supporting communication dimensions is discussed. </p><p> This study also demonstrates the utility of role-level assessment of the psychological safety and relational coordination constructs. In most studies these constructs are assessed at the group level to facilitate comparisons between work groups. However, the role-based data collection and analysis applied in this study identified significant differences in the psychological safety, relational quality, and communication quality measurements with respect to various role-based subsets of the studied work groups. Additional differences were found when both the respondent's role and the role of the individual with whom the respondent was interacting were used as grouping variables. The revealed patterns of differences suggest that psychological safety and the dimensions of relational coordination are influenced by several role-oriented characteristics such as hierarchical status or control as well as a role's centrality or connectivity within an organization's social network. </p><p> The methods and findings presented in this thesis offer small steps toward the greater understanding of the dynamics of high-performance work groups. The practical application of this research includes the development of interventions designed to improve the communication, teamwork, and performance of groups in demanding environments such as hospital care units.</p>

This thesis studies disfluency in spontaneous Swedish speech, i.e., the occurrence of hesitation phenomena like eh, öh, truncated words, repetitions and repairs, mispronunciations, truncated words and so on. The thesis is divided into three parts: PART I provides the background, both concerning scientific, personal and industrial–academic aspects in the Tuning in quotes, and the Preamble and Introduction (chapter 1). PART II consists of one chapter only, chapter 2, which dives into the etiology of disfluency. Consequently it describes previous research on disfluencies, also including areas that are not the main focus of the present tome, like stuttering, psychotherapy, philosophy, neurology, discourse perspectives, speech production, application-driven perspectives, cognitive aspects, and so on. A discussion on terminology and definitions is also provided. The goal of this chapter is to provide as broad a picture as possible of the phenomenon of disfluency, and how all those different and varying perspectives are related to each other. PART III describes the linguistic data studied and analyzed in this thesis, with the following structure: Chapter 3 describes how the speech data were collected, and for what reason. Sum totals of the data and the post-processing method are also described. Chapter 4 describes how the data were transcribed, annotated and analyzed. The labeling method is described in detail, as is the method employed to do frequency counts. Chapter 5 presents the analysis and results for all different categories of disfluencies. Besides general frequency and distribution of the different types of disfluencies, both inter- and intra-corpus results are presented, as are co-occurrences of different types of disfluencies. Also, inter- and intra-speaker differences are discussed. Chapter 6 discusses the results, mainly in light of previous research. Reasons for the observed frequencies and distribution are proposed, as are their relation to language typology, as well as syntactic, morphological and phonetic reasons for the observed phenomena. Future work is also envisaged, both work that is possible on the present data set, work that is possible on the present data set given extended labeling and work that I think should be carried out, but where the present data set fails, in one way or another, to meet the requirements of such studies. Appendices 1–4 list the sum total of all data analyzed in this thesis (apart from Tok Pisin data). Appendix 5 provides an example of a full human–computer dialogue. / The electronic version of the printed dissertation is a corrected version where typos as well as phrases have been corrected. A list with the corrections is presented in the errata list above.

Despite improvements in amplification technology, the vocabulary growth of children with cochlear implants lag behind that of typically developing children. Maternal input may influence opportunities for children with cochlear implants to learn new vocabulary words. This pair of studies compared mothers multimodal cues about word referents available to and used by children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing. The first quantified the proportion of converging and diverging auditory-visual cues present in maternal speech to children with cochlear implants as compared to children with normal hearing matched for chronological age and matched for vocabulary size. Mothers provided input to children with cochlear implants in a way that was different from the way that mothers provide input to children matched for vocabulary size. The second study evaluated the effects of synchronous and asynchronous auditory-visual cues on the word-learning performance of children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing matched for chronological age. Children with cochlear implants did not learn words in either condition, whereas children with normal hearing made use of synchronous cues to learn words. These findings represent a first step toward determining how environment-level factors influence the lexical outcomes of children with cochlear implants.

Gestures are studied as part of the communicative strategies pertaining to a language. This study focuses strictly on the gestures observed in the city of Seville, Spain. The inventory includes the emblems most frequently used by native speakers under 35. The scope of the inventory reaches all the social classes and educational levels currently occurring in the city of Seville.

The political and cultural forces of Periclean Athens brought rhetoric to the fore as the master knowledge. Through the school of Isocrates this perspective continued into the fourth century. Read in this context Plato's degrading attack on rhetoric in the Gorgias can readily be reconciled with his surprisingly positive treatment of it in the Phaedrus. In the Gorgias he does not debunk rhetoric per se, but only rhetorical culture, that is, rhetoric as conceived by his contemporaries as chief among the arts, $\eta$ $\kappa\alpha\lambda\lambda\iota\sigma\tau\eta$ $\tau\omega\nu$ $\tau\varepsilon\chi\nu\omega\nu$. On the other hand, in the Phaedrus he recommends rhetoric conceived in a limited sense as simply one art among many. This is supported by the recent work of Robert Conners who interprets Plato's criticism of rhetorical culture in light of the transition from oral to literate culture in fourth-century Greece.

This study considers a corpus of conversational data from a cognitive perspective. The corpus is comprised of a set of dialogues involving a man interviewing his parents about memories of the Oklahoma frontier. The study views this conversation in cognitive terms as a process in which the interlocutors' separate cognitive systems interact by means of the speech signal and change as a result. Cognitive systems are viewed as networks of relationships. It is shown that the consideration of natural conversation yields insights into the cognitive structures and processing of interlocutors, and conversely, that an understanding of cognitive systems is needed to explain surface patterns observable in conversational texts. Several issues concerning the interaction of cognitive systems are addressed. First, the patterning of conversational topic is investigated to discover how the speaker designates topics within his cognitive system and how speaker and listener coordinate their notions of topic. The behavior of cognitive topic is found to be governed by a principle of accessibility. Of all the information in the network that a speaker could designate as topic, that information which is most accessible will be selected. For the addressee, the less accessible a new topic is, the less likely he is to recognize it and the more carefully the speaker must prepare him. Second, two cases of multiple tellings of a single experience are investigated to find what they reveal about how the speaker stores and expresses first-hand information. A continuum of storage types is proposed that is characterized by factors such as the number of times a memory has been related, the fluency of the delivery, and the amount of sensitivity shown to the listener's cognitive needs. Finally, the range of cognitive tasks interlocutors perform as they exchange information is explored. The functions served by statements in a portion of conversation are examined, and it is proposed that statement functions are unified by a protypical function, that of reporting on information present in the speaker's system. An interpretation of the cognitive effect of statements is suggested which recognizes five basic cognitive situations of information exchange in which statements are employed.

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