Pragmatics of conversation and communication in noisy settings

Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 2159–2184 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Pragmatics of conversation and communication in noisy settings William H. McKellin a,*, Kimary Shahin b, Murray Hodgson c, Janet Jamieson d, Kathleen Pichora-Fuller e a

Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, 6303 North West Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1 b Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z1 c School of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, University of British Columbia, 2206 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z3 d Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education, University of British Columbia, 2125 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4 e Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Mississauga, Ont., Canada L5L 1C6 Received 4 October 2005; received in revised form 14 August 2006; accepted 30 November 2006

Abstract Most analyses of discourse pragmatics assume a quiet setting that does not affect the interaction. This study examines two common, communicationally hostile environmental contexts that make demands on the perceptual, cognitive, and pragmatic dimensions of language and multimodal communication. It identifies strategies which discourse participants use to recover the information lost or degraded in noisy conversational interaction, and the repairs and conversational strategies they use if they recognize that communication has failed. We recorded the conversational discourse interaction of 6 normally-hearing adults in a restaurant setting and 24 normally-hearing children in elementary-school classrooms, using ear-level binaural microphones, head-mounted bullet cameras, and tripod-mounted video cameras. This yielded extensive audiotape and videotape data from the perspectives of individual listeners and speakers, and information about the interaction among participants. Our data indicate that the strategies employed in these settings are similar to those employed by people who are hard-of-hearing, and that usage-based linguistic theories and cognitivist theories of language processing, interaction, and pragmatics, that ignore language perception, are inadequate. # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Discourse strategies; Noise classroom; Usage-based theory; Relevance

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 604 822 2756; fax: +1 604 822 6161. E-mail address: [email protected] (W.H. McKellin). 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.11.012

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1. Introduction If we stop to reflect, noisy settings for conversation are more often the rule than the exception. Numerous studies have investigated the effects of noise on speech intelligibility (Picard and Bradley, 2001). Nevertheless, studies have paid little attention to noise as a factor that affects the pragmatics of conversation, and other forms of social interaction. We are all familiar with the problems of holding a conversation with a friend or acquaintance at a party or in a restaurant while competing with the sounds of other conversations, background music, and the clatter of plates, glasses, and utensils. If we are with a number of friends we may also attempt to keep an ear open to other conversations while listening over the din to the person With whom we are conversing These phenomena are common, and are recognized as the ‘cocktail party effect’ (Cherry, 1953; Cherry and Bowles, 1960; Efron et al., 1983; Yost, 1997; Long, 2005). Similarly, students and instructors face the task of listening over the noise of ventilation fans and other background noise in classrooms, as well as the noise produced by students themselves. Reverberation times, affected by the shape and surfaces in the rooms, further compound the listeners’ tasks (Bradley, 1986; Hodgson and Nosal, 2002). Classroom acoustics is currently the subject of much attention as many, or most, classrooms have poor acoustics (Hodgson, 1999; Nelson et al., 2003; Nelson, 2005). Classroom and restaurant settings both pose communication problems that challenge discourse participants, and provide opportunities for discourse analysts to examine the processes of language use in everyday settings. Conversations invariably occur in these noisy settings, but little is known about how participants conduct conversations in these hostile environments. This issue confronts us daily, but is easily ignored by linguists and sociolinguists. While acousticians have used word recognition as their primary indicator of the effects of noise on communication, our study focused on the previously unexamined impacts of noise on conversational discourse structures and patterns of interaction. Specifically, we were concerned with three questions: (1) How does noise affect grammatical and discourse structures? (2) How does noise affect the ability of the conversational participants to engage in co-construction of conversational themes through collaborative talk and reciprocal turn-taking? (3) What insight does the analysis of conversation in noisy environments provide about the relationships among speech perception, cognitive language processing, and language pragmatics? 2. Contexts and language pragmatics: perception and cognition in conversations Despite the growing attention to the interrelationship between language use in interaction and grammatical constructions, and language pragmatics and cognition, issues of language perception rarely play a role in analyses of conversational analysis, sociolinguistics, or language pragmatics. Studies of the relationship between interaction and grammar (Ochs et al., 1996; Givon, 1997a; Selting, 2001), have moved beyond idealized, decontextualized grammatical analyses to consider the impact of conversational interaction on grammatical constructions. Similarly, usage-based theories of language and language acquisition attempt to ground their analyses in patterns of language usage and the usage-event (Langacker, 1972, 1987, 1990; Givon, 1997b; Barlow and Kemmer, 2000). In usage-based explanations, language acquisition emerges from cognitive processing of language with a variety of forms and contexts (Carpenter et al., 1998; Barlow and

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Kemmer, 2000; Tomasello, 2000; Ellis, 2002; Tomasello, 2003). Similarly, in pragmatics, Relevance Theory seeks justification of its core principle of Optimal Relevance in cognitivist notions of efficiency (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and effort (Van der Henst and Sperber, 2004). Each of these approaches naively assumes an unproblematic relationship among language perception, cognitive processing, and pragmatics; they ignore the impact of the acoustic ecologies of everyday conversational interaction. Psychological studies of the effects of noise on language comprehension and more general assessments of learning in noisy settings provide some insight into the possible consequences of noise for language use and conversational interaction. There is currently great interest among psychologists and audiologists in how competing signals of various sorts interfere with hearing. Whereas white noise and competing speech may mask a target signal acoustically, they differ in their masking of words in word recognition tasks using grammatically correct, but meaningless utterances (Li et al., 2004). A study of the effects of traffic noise and meaningful irrelevant speech on teachers found that both traffic and speech affected recall equally, and irrelevant speech affected the recognition of texts while traffic noise did not (Enmarker, 2004). Similarly, a study of the effects of the same types of noise on listeners ranging from school-aged children to adults with age-related hearing loss discovered that irrelevant noise reduced students’ cued recall of texts and word comprehension (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1995; Boman, 2004). In our study, following Goffman (1963, 1971), we took noise to mean the non-focal sounds that occur during conversational interactions. In the cases we observed, this included external sounds that penetrated from outside the building or from adjacent rooms, mechanical and other background sounds generated by the building’s ventilation and electrical systems inside the rooms studied, the contact sounds created by participants’ activities including chairs, books, dinner utensils, as well as non-focal conversations which, if attention shifted, had the potential to become focal. Our study of conversation in noisy settings suggests that there are also identifiable patterns in the ways that noise and impaired language perception during conversation affect grammatical and discourse structures, language processing, language use, and patterns of interaction in conversations. 3. Data and methods We examined conversational interaction in two noisy settings: with primary school children during group work in classrooms, and with adults eating at a round luncheon table. The study with children took place in a recently built, local primary school, at which teachers and administrators had previously raised concerns about the noise level in classrooms. The school’s total population was 505 students, of whom 52% had first languages other than English. The study itself was conducted in four classes: one split grade 1–3 class, two grade 5 classes, and one grade 7 class. Six students in each class were selected for intensive study from among volunteers. (Those chosen in the grade 1–3 class were all grade 3 students.) The chosen students were all native speakers of English, with no educationally disabling conditions. Their hearing levels were checked and found to be normal. The six students worked at their desks, grouped together in the same manner as the other students in each class. The remaining class members provided the normal background activity. In each study group, each of the six students in the study group wore a set of ear-level microphones (similar to disk-player head phones), one microphone in each ear. The microphones provided a stereo recording of the noise and conversation at the wearer’s ears. Fig. 1 shows one of

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Fig. 1. Classroom study participant wired for recording with binaural microphones and bullet video camera.

the students wired for recording.1 These binaural recordings enabled us to determine the sounds that each student heard and the conversation each produced. These students also wore a headmounted bullet camera that provided a video recording of other students and objects in the wearer’s field of vision, and also recorded the wearer’s head turns, indicators of visual attention. Each group as a whole was recorded by three tripod-mounted video cameras to capture gaze, facial and bodily gestures, and proxemics to contribute to our analysis of the interaction among members of the group; the tripod cameras were also equipped with ambient audio microphones. This complex configuration of recording equipment yielded extensive audiotape and videotape data from the perspectives of individual listeners and speakers and information about the interaction among members of the groups. The adults involved in the study were six faculty members at the University of British Columbia who attended a Research Associates’ lunch at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. They were recorded using the same equipment and technical setup as the students. They sat at one of eight tables in a full dining room. Faculty members’ conversations at the other tables and the noise of china and cutlery were the primary sources of background activity. The Institute associates shared a casual familiarity with each other through Institute events, though they did not know each other well. Their hearing was also assessed in the same manner as the students and was found to be within the normal range. During our audio and video taping in both the school classrooms and the dining room, which lasted 2 h in each setting, the noise levels of the rooms in which the studies took place were measured and recorded by a Larson-Davis 700 noise dosimeter located on the centre of the tables. The rooms were very noisy. In our study, the classrooms’ equivalent continuous (average) noise levels during the study ranged from 68 to 74 dBA, with reverberation times in the rooms when unoccupied between 0.7 and 0.9 s. By contrast, the standard recommended for classroom acoustics is a noise level less than 35 dBA, with a reverberation time of less than 0.4 s (Bradley, 1986) or 0.4–0.6 s under the ANSI standard (Acoustical Society of America, 2002). The noise 1 This research received approval by the University of British Columbia REB and conforms to the Canadian TriCouncil Policy Statement (TCPS) on ‘Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans’. The names used are pseudonyms. The student’s photograph is used with the explicit permission of the student and his parents.

Table 1 Grade 1–3 class: Fondea limited talk (5 min, 15 s) Cole

Fondea

Sol

Roger

Sophie

Anora

Teacher

Other

[laughs] You already said good morning so you said good afternoon.

Uh, ha.

[laugh] What are you drawing?j Those are the cricket fighters. Don’t you know anything?j -the heck? Sol,j Yeah?j um, how many Pokemon do you have?j 60 something? Or 70 something.j

Alright. Throw me some tape please. [tech person]

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[tech person discussing tech hookup with the children]

How far are you?j I beat the whole game already.j I mean how far are you in the game you’re playing right now?j 2163

What do you mean? I mean like <3 syll>.

Cole Here’s Roger. Roger, here’s you.

.j

Sol

OK.k

Sophie

Anora

Teacher

I beat everybody. I beat everybody. I only fought Pokemon. I found so many What?j secrets. I <4 syll>j Yeah, I know. I beat that level.j But I can’t get past that cave because of the waterfall ’cause I need a new gym bag to use my waterfall attack. That will be able to get me up the waterfall.j You beat I have to get past these <3 syll>.j caves and go to the and go back to Koto. When I am in Koto, I can, um, I can Fondea, what are you go to Indigo Plateau. writing? [laughs] And I can beat some, only four.j There’s only 4 of these.j [laugh]

Roger, how do you sp- Roger, is this how you spell your name? R O G E R. E R?k

Roger

I wonder if they have different pokemon. Yours are way better than what Asham got. Because you’ve only got like 5 batteries, and it takes me so many journeys.j

Other

. [tech person]

Ed, can you tell me about this, please? [tech person] Still there? Check over there. [tech person] OK?

That’s why it’s called <1 syll> 4!j

E R.k Yeah.k

Way better than Asham’s.j

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Me?

Fondea

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Table 1 (Continued )

See, there you are, Roger, and there’s a piece of chalk and then the car, it’s here.l Oh, you’re drawing about then?l

It takes him so many journeys.j Then here’s the piece of chalk after. It’s all scruffed up. [laughs] And then, remember, we started that thing where you have the chalk and we tricked the little kids.l

That was so funny.l

Sophie,m wanna play this gamem

Yeah, you’re right. Hehe, likel ‘what’s that Master Magic Mistress?’ Ah! ‘With a little bit of gas [sound effects] I’m alive again!’ That was so funny.l

where you say ‘whatcha doing?’ and I say ‘eatin’ chocolate’. ‘Where’d you get it?’ and then I say <1 syll> ‘a doggie dropped it’.m [laughs]

You can’t do that!

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[laughs] That was so funny. And then you slapped me on the back and I fell down, ’member and I’m like-l

Yeah?m

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Yeah, yeah, when the car ran over the piece of chalk.l

Cole

Fondea

Sol

Roger

Sophie

Anora

Teacher

Other

[laughs] And I’m like, I’m like ‘thankyou ’ and I’m like ‘no problem’.l [laughs] OK.

OK. Oh, and I turned from a cricket fighter into a bladeship ’cause those cricket fighters are too small for the base. This is a giant bladeship. And here are the tiny cricket fighters.j

OK. I’m one. Now what do I do?n

Oh.j

Your teacher will tell you.n n [tech person]

Uh, my teacher’s not here.n I thought the cricket fighter is a cricket and he had a gun.j

Ah

This is the most violent-

Oh, that’d be good.j How do you jump so high?j And he jumps over, whick. whick, wheck.j

A piece of tape please, Ed. A piece of tape please. [tech person]

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Yeah, yeah and I’m like ‘whack!’, and the [sound effects]. Yeah, that was so funny.l

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Table 1 (Continued )

A cricket fighter and a blade ship. Three cricket fighters and one blade ship .j

Hey Sol, that’s your hand!o Sol, stop it! It’s so annoying.o OK Na na na na na.o [humming] De de de de de de de.o

I’m gonna have to be mean to you.o

Sol, we would like to have you continuing, okay?o [tech person]

Whoa! Sol, it’s uh-o Hey, A <2 syll> BStop it, Sol.o OK.o It’s to Sol.o

You can’t do that!

Um, the date is May 21st. Oh, and there’s Roger!o

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Hey look. Buga buga bu.o [humming, goofing off, watching himself in bullet camera monitor]

I hate it, see.

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Cole

Fondea

Sol

Teacher

Get your drawing book.r

p

Other

No.q

fly.p

And get your pencil.r And the bladeship is getting shot up. And anti-air got guns they’ve sneaked in from the military.j

We did that yesterday, though.p

a butterfly?p



She looks so cute in that.s Don’t you do it everyday?p

Huh?p I can’t hear you.p Not everyday. Lots of days, though.p

Yeah, yeah, and they were butterflies yesterday. Before then, they were just <1 syll> berries.p

The butterfly. They’re all so cute.s

Don’t you do it every day?p Eee, Fondea!s

I know I can’t do that.

[laughs] Don’t do that.

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Anora

Sol, don’t we <2 syll>?q

Huh?p Wha-?p

Sophie

And the base is right here. Luckily they can’t hit it. The base has their unlimited guns. You know what I mean? Beep beep beep.j Since I am-

Luckily they can’t <2–3 syll>.j Um, what do we do with this now that we’re done? I’m done doing this. What do I do now?p 4

Roger

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Table 1 (Continued )

But this blade ship needs a few more shots.j

Oh oh Fondea! It looks so cute.s

Huh? Not every day, but lots of days.p

Do you do this every day?p p p

Hmm?p

Uh, dra- Read a book?p

We, we send our <3 syll>.p Uh, no, we’re not playing <3 syll>. Oh no, you can’t do that. [laughs] Ok, read a book.p

IAh, I just gotta put this away!

Yep.t

You’re reading a book? Oh, good idea!t Yea, I’m done.

Everything elseUh.

Can I come?u Yeah, you can come if you’re reading a book.u No, can I come <2 syll>.u

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? No, that’s not it.

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levels during the adult lunch had an average of 79 dBA with a range between 66 and 89 dBA. These levels required the speakers to increase their volumes beyond the levels used for ordinary conversation which in a quiet room is 60 dBA and in an average business office is 65 dBA (Bruel and Kjaer, 1984). The tape recordings were transcribed using time-aligned columns (Ochs, 1979) to present the temporal relations of participants’ utterances based on the recordings from each child or adult’s set of binaural microphones and the ambient sound microphones. The recording and transcription methods enabled us to differentiate between what was said and what was heard by each participant. The video recordings that were synchronized with the audio recordings were used to identify or confirm who was participating, attending, or attempting to participate in interactions, and to examine their orientation, gaze, and gestures. 4. Patterns of conversational performance 4.1. Conversational breakdown and attempts at repairs Conversations do not necessarily succeed in noisy settings. The background noise level can be so high that participants may limit participation. Fondea’s participation was limited in the extreme in the example in Table 1,2 from the grade 1–3 class. During students’ early morning prelesson, drawing activity at their desks, Fondea’s gaze followed the conversational interaction of the other students while they discussed their own drawings. She did not engage in conversation with the other students in her group, but did appear to mouth words, though her voice was not even audible on her own microphone, and she received no response from other students. The drawing activity was followed by a teacher-lead group discussion. Similarly in the adult study, Derek and Belinda in Table 2, after visibly straining to participate in the conversation by moving their heads (and ears) closer to the speakers, sat back and withdrew. (The boldface font and shading near the end of the transcript in Table 1 will be explained later in this section.) Alternatively, participants in a noisy conversation will comment on their inability to hear the target speech. This is illustrated by Cole’s utterance in boldface near the end of the transcript in Table 1. Two further examples are presented in Tables 3 and 4. The excerpt in Table 3 is from an early afternoon pre-reading activity during which students showed confusion about who had the floor when they attempted to start their task identifying what they already knew about ponies. The comments about the difficulty hearing made by Julia and Silas in Table 4, occurred while students discussed their math exercise after receiving instructions by the teacher. Frequently, particular utterances are masked when the noise interferes with speech perception to the extent that the participants are unable to hear. Instances of this were identifiable in our study by comparing participants’ ear-level audio recordings and examining the videotapes. When this happens, the addressee may be inattentive to the speaker; the addressee does not uptake on the speaker’s utterance because he or she fails to realize the speaker’s manifest intention to communicate. This is illustrated in Table 5, in which Lenny’s utterance (shaded text) was masked from Meg. Rather than responding to Lenny’s comment about immigrants, Meg uptakes Derek’s question, which was audible to her. From the videotapes, it did not appear that students attempted 2

In the transcriptions indices mark words that are clearly part of the same conversational exchange, and column adjacency reflects physical adjacency of the participants with the participants on the outside columns seated adjacent to each other at round tables. Unclear productions are enclosed in angle brackets; a hyphen marks an interrupted production; (‘syll’ = syllable(s)).

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Table 2 Adult lunch: Derek and Belinda limited talk (2 min, 25 s) Devin

Ken

Lenny

students graduated and most of the students are not exactly .i

do you work over- seemed to be interest in this increased possibilities and in a ways and habitats seemed obvious to a .j And so I spoke here a few months ago on . I think I’m writing a book on salal.j

Derek Meg

Belinda

Right, even though with reading break next week.i j

The plant?j Yeahj mmhmj So, what we’re trying to do is to .j Theoretically. Art history and <3 syll> ability. That sort of thing.i There’s a couple of these ones here.i .i The reason is that simple i . .>i

Well, do you feel with the different cultural reaction that aboriginal people .j Exactly. So you have different means for salal berries.j

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Table 2 (Continued ) Devin

Ken

Lenny

five years ago.i

.i someone?i

In another culture it’s used primarily for .j

Derek Meg

Belinda

Yeahi There were a lot of people came back to the university
. .>i Uh, writing .i

mhmj So that kind of cross-cultural
There’s, uh, different kinds of reasons.i

.

. . . . .

That’s actually important, um-,i

.i Either way,i

Right.j

. . . . . . .>j

to use lipreading or other visual cues to overcome the masking, even though visual cues can enable a listener to sustain speech in settings with background noise (Sumby and Pollack, 1954). Instead, students preferred to converse with those adjacent to them and moved their ear closer to a speaker to reduce the distance rather than face the speaker to read the person’s lips. The participant who cannot hear often attempts repair by requesting clarification, using whquestions (or expressions like ‘Huh?’) or directly or indirectly asking the speaker to repeat the statement. Cole requests clarification of two teacher utterances which were masked from him near end of Table 1; the masked utterances are shaded in that transcript. Two further examples are presented in Tables 6 and 7, in which shading shows which utterances were masked from Dulene in Table 6 in off-task conversation during a pre-reading activity following the teacher’s introduction of the project about ponies, and in Devin’s lunch-time conversation in Table 7.

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Table 3 Grade 5 class: Julia commenting on her inability to hear (20 s) Dulene

Hugh

Julia

Murphy

Bruce

Ashura

Teacher

other

[laughs] Um. Ouch. Shhhhh. Your turn to read this, isn’t it?i I was just kidding. Do you hear me?i No you weren’t. I don’t hear you. I am deaf.i Do you see that? See that over there? He is really bad. He talks all the time.

4.2. Conversational interaction We normally expect conversations to involve utterances by each of the participants that are recognized as relevant, with appropriate qualities and quantities of information (Grice, 1989; Sperber and Wilson, 1995). While conversations do not necessarily develop as a simple alternating sequence of turns and uptakes the cooperative development of themes among the participants generally reflects coherence and cohesion as individuals participate in turn-taking

Table 4 Grade 7 class: Silas commenting on his inability to hear (30 s) Amilia

Miles

Jim

Silas

Eliza

Jill

Teacher Mark your translations, OK?

Fearless Amelia on camera. Can we hear what we’re trying to say?j

[laughs] I have no idea what I am doing. I’m just doing <1 syll>.i

What are you laughing about?i

Me neitheri What?i

This is really annoying. [laughing]i

Yeah.j What do you think this is?

No, can I hear what you’re saying?j

[laughing]

No, like-[sigh]j

This is off my head.i [laughing]

Draw another one. Going up there, right?

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Table 5 Adult lunch: Meg misses Lenny’s manifest intention to communicate (25 s) Devin

Ken

Lenny

Derek

I can understand that. We have, uh, an officer from the police force in the program now. He’s interested in looking at sort of the questions of-i I’m sorry. Who polices the police?i

Meg

I thought it is some cultural-j But Vietnamese, recent Vietnamese immigrants appear to be quite involved.j

Belinda

Yeah, like Hispanics and Mexicans picking grapes in California.j

What is the economic value of this thing?j

Oh, yeah.i

Florists use it as a backdrop to their bouquets.j

(Goodwin, 1981) and collaboratively share the floor (Edelsky, 1993; Coates, 1997). The coherence of the utterances contributes to the development of conceptual structures as the conversation develops shared or coordinated mutual knowledge, through maintenance and elaboration of topics. This co-construction in conversation or scaffolding (Cazden, 1988) is often evidenced by the coherence of adjacency pairs, conversational overlap, and the completion of one Table 6 Grade 5 class: Dulene requesting clarification (15 s) Dulene

Hugh

Julia

They’re red?i

Oh, my God, your ears are like <3syll>. They’re red. They are red. They are really pink, right?i

Murphy

Bruce

Ashura

Teacher

other

I guess so.i ’Cause your ears are kind of red on the outside.i

<2 syll> got one.

<2 syll> can you get me a piece of paper? I want a soft one.

Right?i What?i His ears are kind of red.i

Maybe I have an inner, middle, and outer ear infection.i

’Cause I’m trapped.j Yeah, I’m trapped, too.j Yeah.j why don’t you go into this?

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Table 7 Adult lunch: Devin requesting clarification (20 s) Devin

Ken

Lenny

Derek

Meg

Belinda

And it’s particularly Canadians, often Indo-Canadians,i mhmi and so salal pickers have become synonymous with a cultural group, not just an activity.i The program is sort of a double-edged sword.j

That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.i

Sorry?j I’d say the program is, the benefits of the program are doubleedged. If your wife comes in, then she’ll have a lot of, sort of freedom that you wouldn’t have in other disciplines.j

And so, so it’s a kind of almost phenomenological notion of habitat.i

speaker’s utterance by the other participant (Jacobs and Jackson, 1983; Tannen, 1984). While Tannock (1998) contended that noisy talk among students was evidence of collaboration, we discovered that the noise generated may actually inhibit conversational collaboration. In our study, when conversations did proceed, the noise of the setting had an identifiable impact on the quantity of information provided and the grammatical and discourse structures used by both children and adults. As a consequence, the conceptual development of themes was restricted. Among both children and adults, there were few instances of co-constructions using overlap and sentence completion. While at times participants were able to collaboratively develop a theme and co-construct the conceptual structures, there were, especially for the children, few instances where the development persisted over several turns. There were frequent changes of topic. In addition, among both adults and children, some individuals dominated the conversational floor. Especially among adults, monologues were coherent, with topics that arose from previous interactions, and were directed to listeners who, from the videotape, appeared to attend to the speaker. Monologues obviated the need for coordinated conversational turn-taking which requires attention to prosodic cues. Example monologues are seen in Table 8 in off-task talk during a post-reading activity, and in the adult lunch conversation in Table 9. Among adults, listeners provided back-channeling though comments or gestures, primarily head nods. This back-channeling was missing among the school children. Both students and adults interrupted monologue-producing speakers, apparently as a strategy for taking the conversational floor. This is illustrated in Table 9, when Meg interrupts Lenny, ostensibly completing his sentence about salal harvesting. Among students, co-construction was limited to two forms. The first is uptake of a fragment of a previous speaker’s statement. (Use of an utterance fragment may indicate an incompletely attended

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Table 8 Grade 5 class: Dulene monologue (10 s) Dulene

Hugh

Julia

Murphy

Bruce

Ashura

Teacher

other [much background chatter]

Oh, yeah, ‘member? Ashura, when I was at my birthday party, um, like, it’s like, ‘you say, we do’. I’m like ‘OK? Let’s, um, jump off a bridge and kill ourself.’ ‘OK, which one?’ I’m like, ‘Mom, can you take us to a bridge? Uh, like, no, like, can we have a ride?’ Like ‘where to, the bridge?’ And she’s like ‘what bridge?’ ‘Any bridge.’ And it’s like, um, and then I say ‘We’re just joking, we’re just joking!’ [laughs] [laughs]

to or heard portion of the previous speaker’s utterance.) In Table 10, as students talk on-task about their reading project on ponies and complete an art project on letters of the alphabet, Hugh uptakes on ‘freeze’, which he overheard from Dulene, Bruce and Ashura’s previous conversation (about whether the school freezes and reuses leftover soup from lunchtimes). Table 9 Adult lunch: Lenny and Meg monologues (1 min) Devin That’s actually an important point.j You’ve got no time to waste.j

Ken

Lenny

Derek

Meg

And of course, I’m interested in the writing of salal. I’m interested in how it’s is used in fiction, in poetry and so on, so on. And I’m also- And this is the big, the real unexplored area for me, which is the whole cult, uh, the whole economic area, because salal is very extensively harvested in the Pacific Northwest and so I’m interested in who harvests it-i by particular, often marginal groups. I have land on Galiano Island where there’s a lot of salal. And it’s particularly Canadians, often Indo-Canadians,i mhmi and so salal pickers have become synonymous with a cultural group, not just an activity.i

Belinda

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Table 10 Grade 5 class: Hugh uptakes on a fragment of previous speaker’s statement (25 s) Dulene

Hugh

Julia

Murphy

Bruce

Ashura

Teacher

other

Yes, they do.i They don’t freeze that stuff!i They put it in the refrigerator.i They do. They do.i <8 syll>. You know what they did? They biofreezed Morris’s and then he ate all the . Huh? I spat carrots at you.

Can I see your K? Can I see your K? Can I see your K? [laughs]

The other way students produced their limited co-construction was through very short turns that might be considered interjections or quips. A typical example is seen in Table 11 in students’ off-task interaction during a pre-reading activity after the teacher explained the activity to the class. This excerpt was followed by students reading passages aloud. While quips might serve to build social solidarity, these children’s utterances offered little content and limited conceptual elaboration consistent with instructional goals. Except for the occasional monologue or soliloquy (see below), all student conversational utterances were short and quip-like. Analysis revealed that the children’s utterances overall were shorter than normal, based on comparison of their MLU scores (mean length of utterance, in words) with normative MLU scores as reported in Loban (1976). MLU was 6.6 for the grade 3

Table 11 Grade 5 class: Dulene and Hugh quips (25 s) Dulene

Hugh

Julia

Murphy

Bruce

Ashura

Teacher

other

OK, I can’t work with this.i Whatever, whatever. Just kidding.i

What? This? What? This? Want it? You want it? You hate it.i I know.i

2178

Cole

Fondea

Sol

I’m done. I gotta get a book. Hmm,

Roger

Anora

Teacher

Other Oh man!

Hi Cole. Hi Cole, I’m looking at you. Whoohoo!i Hi Cole, I’m looking at you.i

which book should I read? <5 syll>.

I want you. I want you.

I’m gonna read. Oh man, <1 syll> make a mess. Which book? I know, there’s a fantansy one. Where is it?

A bunch of them are getting shot up. And we are sending our, many ones called Allen Talkers.j

Or I could <2 syll>,

I know. I played .j

.

Sophie

Ow! No . No, you’re not supposed to touch it!

j

That’s a game, Evelyn OK. [lots of background chatter]

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Table 12 Grade 1–3 class: Cole soliloquy (30 s)

Amilia

Miles

Jim No! I’m not done.

Silas

Eliza

Jill

I feel really stupid.

Teacher Okay, so now you’re gonna do-

‘Create a design by reflecting the image horizontally.’ What?! Oh my God!

Now, is that a reflection?i

Let’s find out.i ‘Kay, this oneSo where do we .j . Yeah. .

Whoops. Oooohhh.

Do do do do do do do. [singing] Yeah! I’m singing. [laughs] .

[clearing her throat] Where do you even write the-j

Yeah. Ok, hold on! Um.

See, if you look at this, your other side should lookOkay. So, let’s get you a better pencil.

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Table 13 Grade 7 class: Amilia, Jim, Eliza and Jill in parallel talk (40 s)

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students, 5.5 for the grade 5 students, and 6.0 for the grade 7 students, while the normative scores are 7.6, 8.8, and 9.8, respectively. The students’ short and semantically simple turns, with limited elaboration of themes, resulted in frequent topic changes. Students also engaged in soliloquies in which the only intended audience appears to be the speaker. These productions were audible to other participants (unlike Fondea’s production mentioned in connection with Table 1), based on their ear-level and video recordings, and listeners did not take up the topic or respond to the speaker. The child speaker, as with the monologues, does not appear to be affected by this lack of hearer response. For example, Cole produces a soliloquy in Table 12 during a time for students to do pre-lesson drawing at their desks prior to a teacher-lead group discussion about ‘‘classroom temperature’’ or the students’ and teacher’s moods and feelings, where the students were seated in a group on the floor. The soliloquies show a lack of engagement with the student group. This lack also occurred in students’ parallel talk, which, like parallel play, is a social behavior unusual for children over 3 or 4 years of age (Howes, 1987). The parallel talk was perceived but was not part of engaged social interaction between students. An example is presented in Table 13. Following the teacher’s introduction and explanation of a math exercise, students worked at their desks while some engaged in on-task and off-task conversations. The parallel talk in excerpt Table 13 is partially on-task and partially off-task. Afterwards, the teacher and students discussed the correct answers. 4.3. Summary Our data from both children and adults indicate that noise significantly alters the pragmatics of conversational discourse. The effects range from masking and the inability of individuals to interact, to attempts to repair the incomprehensible conversation, to extreme changes in the lengths of turns ranging from short quips to extensive monologues. We also observed differences between adults and children in their use of conversational cues. Adults, but not children, used verbal and visual back-channeling to maintain a speaker-‘listener’ relationship though the speech may not be comprehensible. Children used soliloquies and parallel talk which do not engage an audience but reflect verbal and social isolation. Comparison of the two sets of interactions suggests that there are differences between child and adult approaches to communicating in noisy environments and suggests differences in pragmatic socialization that may be developmental (Blum-Kulka, 1997). 5. Discussion—pragmatics of perception and impaired conversations The conversational strategies of both adults and children in noisy environments present systematic patterns. While our findings demonstrate a relationship between noise and reverberation and conversational interaction, they have more implications for studies of language perception and language processing. They bear striking similarities to analyses of the behaviors of hearing-impaired adults and children who also suffer from compromised speech perception and spoken language comprehension. The similar behaviors include: 1. Avoidance of talk (Stephens et al., 1999). 2. Requests for clarification and/or overt repair, e.g., request for repetition, request for the speaker to speak up or slow down, or body repositioning (Robertson et al., 1997; PichoraFuller et al., 1998; Stephens et al., 1999). 3. Less discussion on a shared topic (Seawald and Brackett, 1984; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1998).

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4. Short turns, and turns with little semantic content (Seawald and Brackett, 1984; Johnson and Pichora-Fuller, 1994; Pichora-Fuller et al., 1998). 5. More topic initiations and, therefore, more topic shifts (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1998). 6. Less pursuit and development of subtopics (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1998). 7. Acknowledgments/back-channels when the details of the previous utterance(s) are actually not comprehended but the speaker is pretending to understand (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1998; Stephens et al., 1999). 8. Dominating turns, e.g., monologues (Wilson et al., 1998). 9. Interruption as a device used to take control of the conversation (Stephens et al., 1999). 10. Use of a fragment of another speaker’s previous utterance as topic for conversation (PichoraFuller et al., 1998), signaling that the speaker did not actually follow the details of the previous talk. 11. Quips resulting in more turns on different topics per minute, and therefore, shorter turns (Pichora-Fuller et al., 1998). The similarities between normal-hearing individuals’ conversations in hearing impairing contexts and the conversational strategies of individuals with auditory losses suggest that both problems with perception affect language use and social interaction in similar ways. Attempts to engage in conversations with relevant information in conversational turns are often seen in moves to take and control the floor, while the frequent changes of topic and difficulties in developing conversational topics and conversational interaction indicate that hampered perception limits the ability of both impaired and normally-hearing people to interact in ways that are socially appropriate. In both instances individuals can be socially and communicationally isolated—a fact particularly evident in the children’s performance of soliloquies. The norms of interaction in noise clearly differ from those in settings where perception is not affected. The constraints of noise on perception alter the norms of interaction and the quantity of information exchanged. For school children, given these constraints, the informational, educational goals of the interactions, as intended by the teacher, seem to be redefined as socially oriented interaction by the students in this particular acoustic ecology. Comparison between the children’s and adults’ interactions in noisy environments indicates developmental differences in pragmatic socialization (Blum-Kulka, 1997) and may relate to the adults’ use of top-down processing based on their knowledge of language (Kazanina et al., 2006), and adults’ prior acquisition of schemas for filtering during auditory perception (Bregman, 1990). 6. Conclusions Noisy settings are so ubiquitous that they have gone unexamined by linguists and sociolinguists. Our examination of conversation in noisy settings has demonstrated the important role of the acoustic ecology on verbal interaction. Though often ignored, hearing-impairing settings have identifiable and regular effects on sentence and discourse structure, patterns of interaction, and the co-construction of cognitive structures by speakers and hearers. The phonological cues used in the definition of interactional units, turn-taking and back-channeling (Ford and Thompson, 1996), are unavailable or altered in noisy settings. This results in conversational breakdown and limited or ineffective attempts at repair. Our data have demonstrated that the acoustic constraints have clear repercussions on grammatical constructions, including effects on utterance lengths, grammatical complexity, and questioning strategies. Patterns of conversational discourse and interaction are also altered; conventional

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norms for turn-taking give way to monologues, soliloquies, and failure in topic development and co-construction. The short turns, short utterances, children’s quips, and lack of conceptual elaboration suggest that, as adults in ‘‘cocktail party conversation’’ appreciate, talk in noisy settings is either largely phatic, concerned with social interaction (rather than information exchange and language modeling), or it results in social isolation, as evidenced here by withdrawal and soliloquies. The similarities in conversational strategies of both acoustically and auditorily impaired conversation underscore the critical interaction between the perceptual and cognitive aspects of language processing. Traditionally, studies of conversational interaction and language processing have presumed that problems with listening were irrelevant. Our study shows that problems with perception have a significant and systemic impact on the very common, familiar settings of many conversations in noisy rooms. Accounts of language processing, language acquisition, and language pragmatics, particularly those that employ a usage-based model of language or those that appeal to notions of cognitive efficiency, are incomplete if they ignore the perceptual dimensions of language processing and the impact of acoustic ecologies on language use. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the staff and students who made our research in a local elementary school possible, and the Associates of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies who participated directly and indirectly in the research. We also want to acknowledge the assistance of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Arts ISIT for help with the technical complexities of our data collection. For helpful discussions, we thank the members of the UBC Peter Wall Acoustic Ecology Project, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson, and participants in the Acoustic Ecology Workshop on Communication in Noisy Environments: Adam Jaworski, Ruth Latovsky, Carol Flexer, Bridget Shield, Courtney Cazden, Spencer Kelly, and John Willinsky. Portions of this paper were presented at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics and the 2003 International Pragmatics Association Conference where we benefited from discussants’ comments. This research was supported by a Major Thematic Grant, ‘‘Acoustic Ecology,’’ (PIs Kathleen Pichora-Fuller and William McKellin) from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia. References Acoustical Society of America, 2002. Acoustical Performance Criteria, Design Requirements, and Guidelines for Schools-ANSI S12.60-2002. Acoustical Society of America, Melville, NY. Barlow, Michael, Kemmer, Suzanne, 2000. Usage-Based Models of Language. CSLI Publications Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, CA. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, 1997. Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse. L. Erlbaum Assoc. Publishers, Mahwah, NJ. Boman, Eva, 2004. The effects of noise and gender on children’s episodic and semantic memory. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 45, 407–416. Bradley, John S., 1986. Predictors of speech intelligibility in rooms. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 80 (3), 837–845. Bregman, Albert S., 1990. Auditory Scene Analysis. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Bruel and Kjaer, 1984. Measuring Sound. http://www.bksv.com/pdf/Measuring_Sound.pdf, accessed 21 August 2005. Carpenter, Malinda, Nagell, Katherine, Tomasello, Michael, 1998. Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 63, 1–176. Cazden, Courtney B., 1988. Classroom Discourse: the Language of Teaching and Learning. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.

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