Tag: Melissa Baese-Berk

Professionalism: Swearing in the Workplace

Presenter: Victoria Pineiro – Environmental Studies

Co-Presenter(s): Andi Van Laanen

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk, Myrihe Rohbock

Session: (Virtual) Oral Panel—Read, Speak and Act

In recent years, swearing has moved from somewhat of a taboo topic to a more common and acceptable practice in day to day life. This particular research examines how swearing impacts perceptions of professionalism in the workplace, with gender stereotypes as a sub focus. To investigate this, two surveys were distributed to primarily college aged individuals, and each survey had two sets of audios with the same scripts, one with a woman swearing and man not swearing, and the other with a man swearing and a woman not swearing. Participants were then asked about their perceptions of the speaker in each audio and to reflect on their feelings towards each as a whole. Overall, we found that swearing and professionalism have a negative relationship, regardless of gender. In conclusion, by conducting this research we are able to investigate the various ways professionalism is portrayed through different linguistic choices.

Code-Switching: Students in Formal v.s Informal Settings

Presenter: Ashling Mahony − Psychology

Co-Presenter(s): Sofia Martin, Taylor Bollenbaugh, Simone Baeza

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Session: (Virtual) Poster Presentation

The way we communicate is always changing. It even changes when we speak to different people or in different settings. We decided to look further into the details of how specifically college- aged students change their lexicon and grammar in formal and informal settings. This is known as code-switching–alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in a single conversation. We have looked at responses from students from each scenario and have drawn conclusions from both sets of responses. We want to see how college-aged students code-switch their language in different situations. The two different environments we are going to study are formal/classroom settings and informal/social media settings. We want to see how college-aged students react to online school versus in-person school. We sent out questionnaires for students to complete anonymously. UO academic residential communities and Instagram stories will be how we get the majority of our responses. Hybrid learning has created an academic environment that is formal, yet informal. When students code-switch in response to a change in setting, the type of language they speak reflects their attitudes and interests in those different situations. The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly transformed many students’ attitudes towards education in the United States. We can use our results to help predict what the future of education may look like post- pandemic.

Usage of Taboo Words in Online Settings of Varying Anonymity

Presenter: Dylan Lew – Psychology

Co-Presenter(s): Olivia Ward, Josh Weinrobe, Evan Wong

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Session: (In-Person) Oral Panel—Communication: How and Why

This is an observational study to see how the use of taboo language on social media platforms changes depending on the anonymity of its users. To accomplish this, we examined the contents of comments on posts from three different social media platforms: Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. Each of these varies slightly in how much emphasis is put upon the user’s image, with Instagram emphasizing personal content production (selfies, snapshots, etc.) while Twitter and Reddit content being more impersonal (e.g. discussions, news, etc.). We hypothesized that users on platforms that promote personal content less would correlate with less frequent usage of taboo words, as usage of these words could be considered harmful to a user’s image. For several days, we collected 100 comments total across several posts and tallied the number of total swears present across all comments. We also categorized each swear into either definite swears, and non-definite swears whose taboo nature is debated in order to measure the intensity of swearing. Our preliminary results conform to our initial hypothesis, with Instagram comments having much lower amounts of swearing present than on Reddit or Twitter. This may indicate that anonymity plays a significant role in user behavior online regarding swearing, with more anonymity corresponding with more intense and/or frequent swearing.

Do we perceive when they deceive? Effect of pauses and dialect on the perception of deception

Presenter: Zoë Haupt − Communication Disorders and Sciences

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation

When attempting to detect a lie, numerous social and linguistic factors influence the perception of whether the speaker is telling the truth or lying. The current study investigates how pausing and dialect influence listeners’ judgments of truthfulness. Pauses are often associated with deceptive behavior, but it is unclear how the specific acoustic qualities of pauses affect the listeners’ perception of deception. An additional factor that has been shown to influence listener judgments is the dialect of the speaker. Speakers who use African American English (AAE) dialects, for example, are perceived as less credible than speakers who use a Standard American English (SAE) variety. In this study, bidialectal speakers recorded several narratives using both AAE and SAE. Listeners were asked to rate how truthful each speaker is after listening to a recording of a narrative via an online survey. Pause duration and the dialect used by the talker were manipulated to investigate the contributions of each factor to the perception of deception. The findings of this study will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between social biases and speech perception, linguistic markers associated with deception, and listeners’ perceptions and judgments of pausing and dialects.

 

Code-Switching: Students in Formal vs. Informal Settings

Presenter: Taylor Bollenbaugh − Advertising

Co-Presenter(s): Simone Baeza, Ashling Mahony, Sofia Martin

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

(Virtual) Poster Presentation

The way we communicate is always changing. It even changes when we speak to different people or in different settings. We decided to look further into the details of how specifically collegeaged students change their lexicon and grammar in formal and informal settings. This is known as code-switching–alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in a single conversation. We have looked at responses from students from each scenario and have drawn conclusions from both sets of responses. We want to see how college-aged students code-switch their language in different situations. The two different environments we are going to study are formal/classroom settings and informal/social media settings. We want to see how college-aged students react to online school versus in-person school. We sent out questionnaires for students to complete anonymously. UO academic residential communities and Instagram stories will be how we get the majority of our responses. Hybrid learning has created an academic environment that is formal, yet informal. When students code-switch in response to a change in setting, the type of language they speak reflects their attitudes and interests in those different situations. The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly transformed many students’ attitudes towards education in the United States. We can use our results to help predict what the future of education may look like postpandemic.

Code-Switching: Students in Formal vs. Informal Settings

Presenter: Simone Baeza − Business Administration

Co-Presenter(s): Sofia Martin, Ashling Mahony, Taylor Bollenbaugh

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

(Virtual) Poster Presentation

The way we communicate is always changing. It even changes when we speak to different people or in different settings. We decided to look further into the details of how specifically collegeaged students change their lexicon and grammar in formal and informal settings. This is known as code-switching–alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in a single conversation. We have looked at responses from students from each scenario and have drawn conclusions from both sets of responses. We want to see how college-aged students code-switch their language in different situations. The two different environments we are going to study are formal/classroom settings and informal/social media settings. We want to see how college-aged students react to online school versus in-person school. We sent out questionnaires for students to complete anonymously. UO academic residential communities and Instagram stories will be how we get the majority of our responses. Hybrid learning has created an academic environment that is formal, yet informal. When students code-switch in response to a change in setting, the type of language they speak reflects their attitudes and interests in those different situations. The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly transformed many students’ attitudes towards education in the United States. We can use our results to help predict what the future of education may look like postpandemic.

Diagnosing Stress: The Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Warm Springs Ičiškiin

Presenter: Brittany Parham

Faculty Mentor: Melissa Baese-Berk, Spike Gildea

Presentation Type: Oral

Primary Research Area: Social Science

Major: Linguistics

This thesis will investigate the phonetic cues by which speakers produce and identify stressed syllables in the Ičiškiin Sahaptin language, still spoken in three distinct dialect regions: the Yakima valley in Washington, and both Warm Springs and Umatilla in Oregon, all of whom collectively have no more than 40 first language speakers. There have been no detailed phonetic studies of Warm Springs Ičiškiin, but dictionaries and teaching materials from the dialects suggest that Warm Springs shows a distinctly different placing of syllable stress than those of the Yakima and Umatilla dialect. Accurate phonetic analysis of prosody (the patterns of stress and intonation in a language) can only be done by recording speakers, who utter words and sentences following specific elicitation protocols; these recordings can then be analyzed to figure out what parts of the acoustic signal tell speakers that a syllable is stressed. Doing this for two different dialects allows us to compare them, to see if the same phonetic properties have just shifted to different syllables in the different dialects, or whether perhaps stress is signaled by different phonetic properties in the different dialects. I will also do a short comparison to their sister language Nez Perce to add to the knowledge and understanding of the historical familial relationship these languages share, and in turn perhaps find an explanation to why Yakima and Warm Springs languages might pattern stress differently.

The Effectiveness of Audiovisual Training on Non-Native English Speech Production and Perception

Presenter(s): Chia-ni Shen − Psychology, Communication Disorders & Sciences

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Poster 118

Research Area: Linguistics (Second Language Production And Perception)

Funding: UROP Mini Grant

In this project, we will examine the effectiveness of audiovisual training, pairing audio input with visual input, on non-native English speech production and perception. Speech perception relies on both acoustic information and visual information. Audiovisual training is a method that applies use of the two domains. Previous research utilizing this method has been employed in the field of speech pathology, showing positive outcomes in improving speech among dyslexic children. However, few studies to date have examined its use in second language learning. Furthermore, this research has focused primarily on perception and production of English /l/ and /r/ but not consonants made with the lips (i.e., labial sounds: /b,p,m,f,v/), which are known to be challenging for many second language learners though the differences between these consonants are typically visible on the lips. Therefore, the aim of this project is to explore audiovisual training across 3 non-native language groups: Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. Participants will take part in a training study designed to examine the effects of audiovisual and audio-only training. Performance before and after the training will be assessed via perception and production tests. We hypothesize that 1) student production performance and perception performance will improve and 2) production and perception improvement will rely heavily on a participant’s language background and known difficulties with labial sounds. Results from this research will enrich understanding of language perception and production and provide information on the use of audiovisual training in second language learning.

Dialect Variation in English: An Investigation into the Disappearing Word Effect

Presenter(s): Cydnie Davenport

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Oral Session 1 SW

Recent research (e.g., Dilley & Pitt, 2010) has demonstrated that manipulation of speech rate influences listeners’ perception of syllables in English. For example, when a sentence like “Don must see the harbor or boats” is spoken quickly, the portion “harbor or” can blend together, creating an utterance that is ambiguous with a sentence like “Don must see the harbor boats.” Slowing down the surrounding speech rate can cause a listener’s perception of the sentence to switch from the harbor or boats version to the harbor boats version. When listeners hear a slower speaking rate, they expect to hear fewer words than when they hear a faster rate, an effect described as the “context speech rate effect.” This behavior has only been investigated in “standard” American English, not in dialects that may differ in terms of their pronunciation and how they can be perceived. Research has also not yet considered how social context influences this effect. This project asked how various dialects of American English impact spoken word segmentation. This is critically important because dialect information in someone’s speech can result in both social judgments, and can significantly impact how speech is understood. By investigating how various dialects interact with cognitive mechanisms like this context speech rate effect, we also raise the question of how social and cognitive factors interact during human communication.

The Role of Semantic Predictability in Adaptation to Nonnative-Accented Speech

Presenter(s): Kayla Walker—Linguistics

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation

Nonnative-accented speech is more difficult for native listeners to understand than native-accented speech . However, listeners can improve their abilities to understand nonnative- accented speech through exposure and training . The goal of this project is to explore whether exposing native listeners to different sentence types affects listeners’ adaptation to nonnative speech . Listeners will be trained on high predictability sentences (e .g ., “The color of a lemon is yellow”), low predictability sentences (e .g ., “Mom said that it is yellow”), or semantically anomalous sentences (e .g ., “The green week did the page”) . Previous research has demonstrated that semantic predictability impacts speech perception, but its influence on adaptation to nonnative speech is unknown . This research aimed to answer the following questions: Does training with low predictability or anomalous stimuli require listeners to focus more attention on the acoustic-phonetic properties of the accent and thus lead to greater adaptation and generalizable learning? Or will training with high predictability stimuli provide valuable semantic information that will allow listeners to create a better framework for improving perception? Overall, preliminary results indicate that training with low predictability sentences provides listeners with an advantage over training with high predictability sentences . Using higher effort in training with more challenging sentences allows listeners to construct generalizable knowledge about the speech rather than relying on semantic prediction during a transcription task .