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Master of Arts / Department of Communication Studies, Theatre, and Dance / Leann M. Brazeal / In this thesis study, the use of group work as an instructional strategy was assessed to determine the effect it has on students’ willingness to communicate, communication apprehension, and self-perceived competence. Students enrolled in a basic public speaking at a major Midwestern university completed Neer’s (1987) Classroom Apprehension about Participation Scale (CAPS) at the beginning of the semester and again four weeks later after being exposed to a treatment of group or no group. Results indicated students’ willingness to communicate and self-perceived competence increased over the four-week duration of the study regardless of treatment. However, a significant reduction of communication apprehension was seen in students using group work in their classrooms. Limitations and implications are discussed.

Research on clear speech has shown that the type of clear speech produced can vary depending on the speaker, the listener and the medium. Although prior research has suggested that clear speech is more intelligible than conversational speech for normal-hearing listeners in noisy environments, it is not known which acoustic features of clear speech are the most responsible for enhanced intelligibility and comprehension. This thesis focused on investigating the acoustic characteristics that are produced in clear speech to foreigners and infants. Its aim was to assess the utility of these features in enhancing speech intelligibility and comprehension. The results of Experiment 1 showed that native speakers produced exaggerated vowel space in natural interactions with foreign-accented listeners compared to native-accented listeners. Results of Experiment 2 indicated that native speakers exaggerated vowel space and pitch to infants compared to clear read speech. Experiments 3 and 4 focused on speech perception and used transcription and clarity rating tasks. Experiment 3 contained speech directed at foreigners and showed that speech to foreign-accented speakers was rated clearer than speech to native-accented speakers. Experiment 4 contained speech directed at infants and showed that native speakers rated infant-directed speech as clearer than clear read speech. In the fifth and final experiment, naturally elicited clear speech towards foreign-accented interlocutors was used in speech comprehension tasks for native and non-native listeners with varying proficiency of English. It was revealed that speech with expanded vowel space improved listeners’ comprehension of speech in quiet and noise conditions. Results are discussed in terms of the Lindblom’s (1990) theory of Hyper and Hypoarticulation, an influential framework of speech production and perception.

Depuis une trentaine d’années, les citoyens des démocraties libérales boudent les isoloirs, souvent dépités par le manque d’impact de leur geste sur leur environnement (Sandel, 2012; Putnam, 2000). Plutôt que d’abandonner la sphère publique, plusieurs d’entre eux ont choisi de l’investir autrement. C’est ainsi que le monde occidental a connu un essor certain de la participation publique. Contrairement au vote, le citoyen est ici invité à prendre la parole, mais aussi à écouter les opinions des autres participants. Il se retrouve donc investi d’un rôle bien plus complexe sans être nécessairement doté des outils lui permettant d’accomplir la mission. Cette étude se penche sur le processus de l’écoute en consultation publique et vise à en déplier les mécanismes. Il s’agit d’observer comment s’exprime l’écoute en consultation publique, en dressant une typologie des marqueurs d’écoute et des sollicitations à l’écoute pour en étudier le fonctionnement. L’étude révèle qu’une écoute attentive peut se transformer en une écoute plus engagée quand une négociation mesurée de l’écoute prend place. Pour cela, chacun des acteurs doit être conscient de lui-même mais aussi de l’autre, du rôle de l’autre et du but final de la consultation. L’écoute engagée privilégie le partage d’autorité et auteurité nécessaire à la co-construction d’un discours entre tous les acteurs, une écoute qui se matérialise par le rapport que la commission remet aux preneurs de décision. La légitimité de ce rapport dépend du travail en amont entre les acteurs et, entre autres, de leur capacité à s’écouter, au delà de la dimension discursive. Le type d’écoute mis en œuvre contribue à inférer une légitimité à la consultation publique. / For the past thirty years or so, many citizens of liberal democracies have shunned their polling booths, often frustrated by the lack of impact their votes are having on the consequent political environment (Sandel, 2012; Putnam, 2000). Rather than abandoning the public sphere altogether, some are choosing different mechanisms to be heard and to influence outcomes. This is why the Western world is experiencing a rise of more direct citizen participation in public policy discussions. Unlike voting, we are now not only able to express and disseminate our opinions and points of view but we can also hear and consider the views of others. But even while citizens find themselves invested with more opportunity to engage in public conversation, they are still lacking the tools to effective accomplish their objective. This study focuses on “listening” in the public consultation process and seeks to understand its mechanisms. We observe how listening is manifested in public consultations by drawing up a typology of signs indicating listening, and sollicitations to listen and then studying its functioning. The study reveals that attentive listening can turn into committed listening as listening priorities are negociated and established. For this to work, each participant must be aware of the input of the other and be constantly aware of final goal of the consultation in question. Committed listening favors sharing authority and authorship among stakeholders. The final report submitted to elected decision makers reflects the discourses but also the listening capacity expressed during the sessions. The legitimacy of this report depends on preparatory work between actors and, among other things, their willingness to listen to each other as well as speak. The quality of the participants’ listening skills has an impact on the public consultation’s legitimacy.

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The work presented in this thesis comes in pursuit of the ultimate goal of building spoken and embodied human-like interfaces that are able to interact with humans under human terms. Such interfaces need to employ the subtle, rich and multidimensional signals of communicative and social value that complement the stream of words – signals humans typically use when interacting with each other. The studies presented in the thesis concern facial signals used in spoken communication, and can be divided into two connected groups. The first is targeted towards exploring and verifying models of facial signals that come in synchrony with speech and its intonation. We refer to this as visual-prosody, and as part of visual-prosody, we take prominence as a case study. We show that the use of prosodically relevant gestures in animated faces results in a more expressive and human-like behaviour. We also show that animated faces supported with these gestures result in more intelligible speech which in turn can be used to aid communication, for example in noisy environments. The other group of studies targets facial signals that complement speech. As spoken language is a relatively poor system for the communication of spatial information; since such information is visual in nature. Hence, the use of visual movements of spatial value, such as gaze and head movements, is important for an efficient interaction. The use of such signals is especially important when the interaction between the human and the embodied agent is situated – that is when they share the same physical space, and while this space is taken into account in the interaction. We study the perception, the modelling, and the interaction effects of gaze and head pose in regulating situated and multiparty spoken dialogues in two conditions. The first is the typical case where the animated face is displayed on flat surfaces, and the second where they are displayed on a physical three-dimensional model of a face. The results from the studies show that projecting the animated face onto a face-shaped mask results in an accurate perception of the direction of gaze that is generated by the avatar, and hence can allow for the use of these movements in multiparty spoken dialogue. Driven by these findings, the Furhat back-projected robot head is developed. Furhat employs state-of-the-art facial animation that is projected on a 3D printout of that face, and a neck to allow for head movements. Although the mask in Furhat is static, the fact that the animated face matches the design of the mask results in a physical face that is perceived to “move”. We present studies that show how this technique renders a more intelligible, human-like and expressive face. We further present experiments in which Furhat is used as a tool to investigate properties of facial signals in situated interaction. Furhat is built to study, implement, and verify models of situated and multiparty, multimodal Human-Machine spoken dialogue, a study that requires that the face is physically situated in the interaction environment rather than in a two-dimensional screen. It also has received much interest from several communities, and been showcased at several venues, including a robot exhibition at the London Science Museum. We present an evaluation study of Furhat at the exhibition where it interacted with several thousand persons in a multiparty conversation. The analysis of the data from the setup further shows that Furhat can accurately regulate multiparty interaction using gaze and head movements. / <p>QC 20121123</p>

This thesis is concerned with communication disability and possibilities its therapy by the help of augmentative and alternative communications methods. It describes basic forms disturbed communications possibility and their symptomology too. Further it is focusing on disorders of speech and communication, whichs are consequence of other different disorder, e.g . child's cerebral palsy, autism, sensuous infliction . This work is bent on methods of augmentative and alternative communication ( AAC), which are accessible in the Czech republic.Practical part is engaged on experiences of individual informants (parents which look after the child with disturbed communications ability) with augmentative and alternative communications systems. It deals with possibilities of the usage of AAK system and its benefit for children.

Master of Arts / Department of Speech Communication, Theatre, and Dance / Charles J. Griffin / This thesis is a response to a contemporary debate over the nature of rhetoric. Specifically, it has recently been declared that rhetoric is aesthetic. This move is known as the "aesthetic turn" and it has been both praised and denounced by rhetoric scholars. An aesthetic rhetoric is concerned not with the content of a message, but rather with the presentation of the message. In this thesis, I argue that an aesthetic turn is a good turn to make in theory, but that the actual turn taken by a number of prominent rhetorical scholars has been misguided. A Catholic theory of beauty is developed within this thesis as an alternative to the postmodern aesthetic. The Catholic theory posits that beauty flows from three forms: the accidental, the substantial, and the transcendental. Accidental beauty is concerned with physical traits and can be judged through integrity, proportion, and splendor. Substantial beauty deals with an object's telos or end and is judged according to the actualization of telos. Transcendental beauty is a trait of all beings and can be judged hierarchically according to participation in Being. Finally, a methodology for analyzing beauty is developed within the thesis. In order to reify the Catholic theory of beauty and its methodology the Roman Catholic Mass of 1962, also known as the Tridentine Mass, is analyzed as a case study. This artifact was chosen in particular because it was recently liberated from bureaucratic imprisonment by Pope Benedict XVI. In addition to analyzing the traditional Roman rite, several changes that were made to the Mass after the Second Vatican Council are examined. This study is important for several reasons. First, it provides rhetorical scholars with a clear understanding of beauty with which rhetoric can be analyzed. Also, the aesthetic theory offered by this study transcends the differences between rhetoric-as-epistemic and rhetoric-as-aesthetic scholarship. Most importantly though, view of beauty that is advanced implies an ethic from which rhetoric can be evaluated. Finally, the study has important implications for the development of the Roman Catholic liturgy.

La médiation est un dispositif de gestion de différends impliquant la présence et l’intervention d’une tierce personne, médiateur ou médiatrice, dont le rôle principal est d’en faciliter la résolution. L’étude de ce type d’interactions est souvent abordée par le biais d’analyses détaillées, centrées principalement sur la dynamique des tours de parole. Le présent travail propose de décentrer cette posture et de dresser un portrait en creux des interactions, en donnant la part belle à l’écoute. Comment, en effet, les participants tentent-ils de se faire écouter, et comment marquent-ils leur écoute ? L’ubiquité de l’écoute et son caractère spectral en font un objet d’étude évanescent, difficile à circonscrire. Pour cette raison, la présente étude vise à décrire et comprendre la manière dont l’écoute s’incarne, et ce, à travers des marqueurs d’écoute relevés lors de médiations durant lesquelles un citoyen et le représentant d’une institution tentent de régler le conflit qui les oppose. Les séances de médiation analysées sont réelles (il ne s’agit pas d’exercices). Captées en format vidéo puis retranscrites, ces données empiriques ont permis d’identifier des mécanismes d’écoute dialogique ainsi que des phénomènes clés rattachés à ces mécanismes. L’intention ici était d’observer la différence qu’un marqueur d’écoute ou son absence est susceptible de faire dans une interaction. Il ne s’agissait donc pas de juger de la qualité d’écoute des participants en tant que telle, mais plutôt de révéler la manière dont ceux-ci réagissaient à ce qui avait été précédemment exprimé et ce qu’ils en faisaient. Autrement dit, les marqueurs d’écoute doivent être compris, selon cette perspective, comme les moyens par lesquels l’existence de certaines choses qui semblent compter pour un participant se met à aussi compter pour le ou les autres. Parmi les phénomènes relevés se trouvent les manières de se faire écouter et les modes d’écoute des participants, mais aussi la manière dont les marqueurs d’écoute s’inscrivent dans des schémas décrits comme la trajectoire de l’écoute ou encore les boucles d’écoute. Ces boucles d’écoute et la trajectoire d’écoute rendent plus intelligible l’agentivité des humains, mais également celle des documents et des émotions intervenant dans le processus de médiation. Étudier une séance de médiation par le biais de l’écoute permet ainsi de creuser certains concepts proposés dans les travaux portant sur la négociation, comme les notions de position et d’intérêt. L’approche CCR (constitution communicationnelle de la réalité) (Cooren, 2012) adoptée pour cette recherche permet, par ailleurs, de transcender la perspective binaire que l’on retrouve souvent dans les réflexions et analyses portant sur l’écoute (à savoir l’évaluation d’une bonne ou mauvaise écoute) et d’envisager le phénomène sous l’angle de sa performativité, dépouillée de jugements de valeur. L’objectif d’une telle enquête est d’envisager les interactions autrement, avec un recul susceptible d’assister les médiateurs dans leur métier, et potentiellement d’autres acteurs en situation de négociation dans divers milieux organisationnels. / Mediation is a conflict management process that involves the presence and intervention of an impartial third party in charge of facilitating the discussion. Studies of this type of interaction are often conducted through detailed analyses focused on the dynamics of turns of talk. This dissertation proposes to reframe this approach by favouring the detailed study of listening over speaking in interactions. How do participants make themselves heard, and inversely, how do they manifest their listening? Listening’s spectral quality, as much as its ubiquity, challenges any attempt at producing a set definition of the phenomenon. This study aims to describe and comprehend how listening materializes itself as it unfolds. It concentrates on listening markers identified in videos and transcripts produced from 27 actual mediation sessions opposing a citizen and an institutional representative. The Communicative Constitution of Reality (CCR; Cooren, 2012) approach affiliated to the Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) literature allows for an in-depth exploration of listening that challenges the binary model of positive vs. negative listening by choosing to observe its performativity in interactions. For example, it is shown that the absence of listening markers is not necessarily related to the absence of attention, or malevolence. This study aims at observing how listening markers, or lack thereof, are likely to make a difference in the unfolding of a mediation session. The point here is not to judge the participants’ listening quality, but rather to unpack the ways in which participants react to what has been expressed and what they do with that information. In other words, and following the CCR perspective, listening markers indicate means by which the existence of certain things that seem to count for one participant begins to count for the other(s) participant(s) and end up existing more in the interlocutive sphere. Two dialogic listening mechanisms were identified from the analysis of the data set, and various phenomena related to these mechanisms were traced. These phenomena include ways of making oneself heard and the participants’ listening modes, as well the absence of listening markers. The first mechanism, the listening loop, indicates a shift in one or several of the participants’ listening pattern(s); the second is the listening trajectory. Together these mechanisms bring intelligibility to human agency as well as to that of documents or emotions that come into play during the mediation sessions. Studying mediation sessions through listening precipitates reassessing specific notions in the field of negotiation, such as the notions of position and interests. This inquiry considers interactions from the largely untapped perspective of listening, thereby providing insights to conducting mediations. This framework is potentially applicable to a wider range of organizational or peri-organizational areas/fields, including negotiation and decision-making.