Sequencing conversational turns in peer interactions: An integrated approach for evidence-based conversational agent for just-in-time nicotine cravings intervention.

Background: Risky health behaviors place an enormous toll on public health systems. While relapse prevention support is integrated with most behavior modification programs, the results are suboptimal. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) applications provide us with unique opportunities to develop just-in-time adaptive behavior change solutions. Methods: In this study, we present an innovative framework, grounded in behavioral theory, and enhanced with social media sequencing and communications scenario builder to architect a conversational agent (CA) specialized in the prevention of relapses in the context of tobacco cessation. We modeled peer interaction data (n = 1000) using the taxonomy of behavior change techniques (BCTs) and speech act (SA) theory to uncover the socio-behavioral and linguistic context embedded within the online social discourse. Further, we uncovered the sequential patterns of BCTs and SAs from social conversations (n = 339,067). We utilized grounded theory-based techniques for extracting the scenarios that best describe individuals' needs and mapped them into the architecture of the virtual CA. Results: The frequently occurring sequential patterns for BCTs were comparison of behavior and feedback and monitoring; for SAs were directive and assertion. Five cravings-related scenarios describing users' needs as they deal with nicotine cravings were identified along with the kinds of behavior change constructs that are being elicited within those scenarios. Conclusions: AI-led virtual CAs focusing on behavior change need to employ data-driven and theory-linked approaches to address issues related to engagement, sustainability, and acceptance. The sequential patterns of theory and intent manifestations need to be considered when developing effective behavior change CAs.

Performative updates and the modeling of speech acts.

This paper develops a way to model performative speech acts within a framework of dynamic semantics. It introduces a distinction between performative and informative updates, where informative updates filter out indices of context sets (cf. Stalnaker, Cole (ed), Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978), whereas performative updates change their indices (cf. Szabolcsi, Kiefer (ed), Hungarian linguistics, John Benjamins, 1982). The notion of index change is investigated in detail, identifying implementations by a function or by a relation. Declarations like the meeting is (hereby) adjourned are purely performative updates that just enforce an index change on a context set. Assertions like the meeting is (already) adjourned are analyzed as combinations of a performative update that introduces a guarantee of the speaker for the truth of the proposition, and an informative update that restricts the context set so that this proposition is true. The first update is the illocutionary act characteristic for assertions; the second is the primary perlocutionary act, and is up for negotiations with the addressee. Several other speech acts will be discussed, in particular commissives, directives, exclamatives, optatives, and definitions, which are all performative, and differ from related assertions. The paper concludes a discussion of locutionary acts, which are modelled as index changers as well, and proposes a novel analysis for the performative marker hereby.

On the Role of Speech In Psychoanalysis: Revisiting Lacan's "Function and Field".

A number of underutilized concepts in Lacan's "Function and Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis" are examined with an eye to rendering them accessible and practicable to analysts from outside the Lacanian tradition. The concepts of empty and full speech are discussed, along with the notions of the subject of the unconscious, and speaking as itself a mode of intersubjectivity. Attention is afforded the future-oriented mode of psychic temporality that Lacan argues pertains to psychoanalytic practice (that of the future anterior tense, the standpoint from which analysands situate themselves in respect of what they "will have been"). These concepts are then linked to technical initiatives-such as punctuation (the "editorial" role the analyst plays in reference to the analysand's speech) and scansion (the use of suspension, interruption, or cutting to highlight facets of that speech). These techniques can be read as extensions of Freud's fundamental rule of free association insofar as they aim to disrupt defensive ego narratives, engage unconscious processes, and draw analysands' attention, in a potentially transformative manner, to their speech and what it does.

Aportes del psicoanálisis a los estudios de abuso sexual infantil: Análisis del discurso de la madre de una niña abusada sexualmente / Contributions of psychoanalysis to studies of child sexual abuse: Mother's speech analysis about her sexually abused daughter

Se presentan los resultados dela tesis doctoral sobre los deseos y defensas (y sus estados) de la madre de una niña abusada sexualmente, con el objetivo de conocer su estructuración subjetiva en este difícil acontecimiento. Se trata de un estudio de caso en el que se usa como método el Algoritmo David Liberman (ADL), en el análisis del discurso de la madre, seleccionadas tres sesiones y una carta manuscrita. El estudio de deseos y defensas puede contribuir a describir y conocer el posicionamiento subjetivo de una madre frente a la situación abusiva de su hija, y como ésta es vivida por ella AU

The results of the doctoral thesis on the wishes and defenses (and their states) of the mother of a sexually abused girl are presented, with the aim of knowing her subjective structuring in this difficult event. This is a case study in which the David Liberman Algorithm (ADL) is used as a method in the analysis of the mother's speech, three sessions and a handwritten letter selected. The study of desires and defenses can contribute to describing and knowing the subjective position of a mother in the face of her daughter's abusive situation, and how it is experienced by her AU

Religion and the brain: Jordan Grafman's contributions to religion and brain research and the special case of religious language.

Grafman and colleagues' papers in religion and brain research have documented the extent to which religious beliefs and behaviors are mediated by standard social cognitive networks in brain. Grafman's work however also points beyond treatments of religious cognition as merely a species of more general social cognitive processes. Data emerging from experiments targeting mystical states as well as reports of encounters with supernatural agents during controlled experiments with psychedelics, suggest that brain mediation of mystical encounters with supernatural agents involves both disruption/downregulation of social cognitive networks and activation of an additional as yet only partially identified neural process suggesting that a full neuroscience account of religious beliefs, behaviors and experiences must extend beyond treatment of religion as an ordinary social process.

Surface and Contextual Linguistic Cues in Dialog Act Classification: A Cognitive Science View.

What role do linguistic cues on a surface and contextual level have in identifying the intention behind an utterance? Drawing on the wealth of studies and corpora from the computational task of dialog act classification, we studied this question from a cognitive science perspective. We first reviewed the role of linguistic cues in dialog act classification studies that evaluated model performance on three of the most commonly used English dialog act corpora. Findings show that frequency-based, machine learning, and deep learning methods all yield similar performance. Classification accuracies, moreover, generally do not explain which specific cues yield high performance. Using a cognitive science approach, in two analyses, we systematically investigated the role of cues in the surface structure of the utterance and cues of the surrounding context individually and combined. By comparing the explained variance, rather than the prediction accuracy of these cues in a logistic regression model, we found that (1) while surface and contextual linguistic cues can complement each other, surface linguistic cues form the backbone in human dialog act identification, (2) with word frequency statistics being particularly important for the dialog act, and (3) the similar trends across corpora, despite differences in the type of dialog, corpus setup, and dialog act tagset. The importance of surface linguistic cues in dialog act classification sheds light on how both computers and humans take advantage of these cues in speech act recognition.

How affect modulates conversational meanings: a review of experimental research: invited review.

Affect has been found to play important role in word and sentence processing. What is less understood is the role it plays in the process by which interlocutors arrive at what speakers mean. In the present review, the way affect modulates how we comprehend what others mean is examined. This is done by reviewing studies that have employed experimental methods using both written materials and spoken utterances. The goal of the present review is to better understand how the inferential process is framed by affective factors and to propose ways of integrating affectivity into pragmatics. In Part 1, the motivation for the present review is explicated. In Part 2, experimental evidence is presented and suggestions are offered about how to best operationalise variables crucial for disentangling affect from other mechanisms that contribute to utterance interpretation. In Part 3, central notions of pragmatics are discussed with regard to affectivity, which it is proposed that, if construed as a goal-oriented activity that serves interpersonal configuration, can account for several pragmatic phenomena.

Computerized mediated explicit instruction and EFL learners' knowledge of speech acts: Investigating the role of EFL learners' language proficiency and perceptions.

Computer-mediated explicit Instruction (CMEI) is effective in promoting second language development, particularly in the area of speech acts. However, more information is needed about the role of learners' language proficiency and perceptions in the effectiveness of CMEI. This study aimed to investigate the effect of CMEI on EFL learners' knowledge of speech acts, specifically apologies, thanks, and requests, and to examine the moderating role of language proficiency and learners' perceptions of the Instruction. A mixed-method research design was used. The study involved 180 EFL learners who were recruited from Wenzhou Medical University. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) the computer-mediated explicit instruction (CMEI) group, which received explicit Instruction on speech acts through a computer program; (2) the non-CMEI group, which received explicit Instruction on speech acts through traditional classroom instruction; and (3) Control group, which did not receive any explicit instruction on speech acts. The participants' language proficiency was assessed using the Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) prior to the intervention. The quantitative phase employed the pretest-posttest design, and data were collected using a speech act recognition and production test and an interview checklist to measure learners' perceptions of the Instruction. Results showed that CMEL was more effective than non-CMEI. Participants also had positive perceptions of CMEI. Findings have theoretical and practical implications for English language teachers and applied linguists.

Lying about the future: Shuar-Achuar epistemic norms, predictions, and commitments.

Is there variation across cultures in what counts as a lie? Here we present evidence for a potentially unique conceptualization of lying in Shuar-Achuar communities in Ecuador, contrasting this conceptualization with people in twelve other countries and non-Shuar-Achuar Ecuadorians. In Shuar-Achuar communities, but not others, predictions of the future that turn out to be false are considered lies, even when the events that render them false are unforeseen. Failed commitments, on the other hand, are not seen as lies when unforeseen events prevent them from being kept. To explain this phenomenon, we suggest that there is an epistemic norm that regulates predictive speech acts in Shuar-Achuar communities, linked to the view that the future can be known under certain special circumstances. This norm holds that claiming knowledge of the future is a form of lying when events prove the prediction false. Commitments, on the other hand, do not imply certainty about the future and so are not considered lies when circumstances prevent them from being fulfilled. In addition, we found several other factors that influence whether speech acts are categorized as lies, including the speaker's expertise, group membership, and the nature of the outcome.

Speech acts and the communicative functions of emojis in LIHKG online discussion forum amid COVID-19.

Since the beginning of 2022, the Hong Kong government has imposed strict social distancing measures and changed its stance on various regional policies with the aim to contain the so-called 'fifth wave' of COVID-19. In these pandemic and 'infodemic' times filled with uncertainty and fear, Hong Kong netizens used local online discussion forums as a resource to establish an innovative form of 'helping network.' This study is based on 230 posts from a popular local online discussion forum 'LIHKG' in February 2022 when the pandemic was regarded as most critical by the Department of Health. Speech Acts theoretic approach was adopted to explore how forum users employed speech acts to perform various communicative practices such as expressing concerns, asking for information, and engaging with others in a CMC environment amid a global health crisis. Representatives were found to be the most dominant text-based speech acts, followed by directives, expressives and commissives. Speech acts provide forum users a context in which emoji usage occurs. Forum users not only make use of words to 'do' things in the online self-help forum, but they also employ emojis to either supplement or complement speech acts. This study also shows that emojis perform multiple functions in the discussion posts and argues that they do not merely function as emotion indicators of their textual company, but also carry significant pragmatic meanings by illustrating how they can also carry illocutionary force and in some cases, even alter the illocutionary force of their preceding texts. The findings of this study enhance our understanding of how forum users communicate via verbal and nonverbal means within the underexplored 'helping domain' of online discussion forums. It also suggests that online discussion forum interactions need to be approached differently than other better understood alternatives.

Don't be deceived: bald-faced lies are deceitful assertions.

The traditional conception of lying, according to which to lie is to make an assertion with an intention to deceive the hearer, has recently been put under pressure by the phenomenon of bald-faced lies i.e. utterances that prima facie look like lies but because of their blatancy allegedly lack the accompanying intention to deceive. In this paper we propose an intuitive way of reconciling the phenomenon of bald-faced lies with the traditional conception by suggesting that the existing analyses of the phenomenon overlook a non-obvious category of hearers whom the speakers of bald-faced lies intend to deceive. Those hearers are institutions represented by the people involved, such as courts or secret police. We also criticize two recent rival accounts (Jessica Keiser's and Daniel Harris's) that attempt to save the traditional conception by saying that some bald-faced lies are not assertions, because they are conventional-rather than illocutionary-speech acts.

Does the right temporo-parietal junction play a role in processing indirect speech acts? A transcranial magnetic stimulation study.

In communication, much information is conveyed not explicitly but rather covertly, based on shared assumptions and common knowledge. For instance, when asked "Did you bring your cat to the vet?" a person could reply "It got hurt jumping down the table", thereby implicating that, indeed, the cat was brought to the vet. The assumption that getting hurt jumping down a table motivates a vet visit is tacitly attributed to the speaker by the listener, which implies Theory of Mind (ToM) processes. In the present study, we apply repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ), a key brain region underlying ToM, with the aim to disrupt ToM processes necessary for language understanding. We then assess effects on the comprehension of indirect speech acts and their matched direct controls. In one set of conditions, the direct and indirect stimuli where not matched for speech act type, whereas, in the other, these were matched, therefore providing an unconfounded test case for in/directness. When indirect speech acts and direct controls were matched for speech act type (both statements), the indirect ones took longer to process both following sham and verum TMS. However, when the indirect and direct speech acts were not matched for communicative function (accept/decline offer vs. descriptive statement respectively), then a delay was detected for the indirect ones following sham TMS but, crucially, not following verum TMS. Additionally, TMS affected behavior in a ToM task. We therefore do not find evidence that the rTPJ is causally involved in comprehending of indirectness per se, but conclude that it could be involved instead in the processing of specific social communicative activity of rejecting of accepting offers, or to a combination of differing in/directness and communicative function. Our findings are consistent with the view that ToM processing in rTPJ is more important and/or more pronounced for offer acceptance/rejection than for descriptive answers.

Grammatical Perspective-Taking in Comprehension and Production.

Language use in conversation requires conversation partners to consider each other's points-of-view, or perspectives. A large body of work has explored how conversation partners take into account differences in knowledge states when choosing referring expressions. This paper explores how well findings from perspective-taking in reference generalize to a relatively understudied domain of perspective: the processing of grammatical perspectival expressions like the motion verbs come and go in English. We re-visit findings from perspective-taking in reference that conversation participants are subject to egocentric biases: they are biased towards their own perspectives. Drawing on theoretical proposals for grammatical perspective-taking and prior experimental studies of perspective-taking in reference, we compare two models of grammatical perspective-taking: a serial anchoring-and-adjustment model, and a simultaneous integration model. We test their differing predictions in a series of comprehension and production experiments using the perspectival motion verbs come and go as a case study. While our comprehension studies suggest that listeners reason simultaneously over multiple perspectives, as in the simultaneous integration model, our production findings are more mixed: we find support for only one of the simultaneous integration model's two key predictions. More generally, our findings suggest a role for egocentric bias in production for grammatical perspective-taking as well as when choosing referring expressions.

Scalar Implicature is Sensitive to Contextual Alternatives.

The quantifier "some" often elicits a scalar implicature during comprehension: "Some of today's letters have checks inside" is often interpreted to mean that not all of today's letters have checks inside. In previous work, Goodman and Stuhlmüller (G&S) proposed a model that predicts that this implicature should depend on the speaker's knowledgeability: If the speaker has only examined some of the available letters (e.g., two of three letters), people are less likely to infer that "some" implies "not all" than if the speaker has examined all of the available letters. G&S also provided behavioral evidence in support of their model. In this paper, we first show that a simple extension of G&S's model (1) predicts G&S's knowledgeability effects, and in addition, (2) predicts that the knowledgeability effect will be reduced when the speaker's usage indicates numeral alternatives are available. We tested the new model's predictions in four preregistered experiments. All experiments supported the first model prediction, replicating G&S's finding of a main effect of the speaker's knowledge. Further, Experiments 2 and 4 supported the second model prediction showing that the words that a speaker tends to use affect the strength of scalar implicature that comprehenders make. In particular, when the speaker has partial knowledge (e.g., has only examined two of three letters), comprehenders think that "some" is more likely to mean "not all" when the speaker also tends to produce number words in similar sentences (e.g., "2 of today's rooms have working smoke detectors."). These results have important ramifications for theories of meaning: the context beyond the sentence (e.g., the speaker's tendency to use particular words) affects the set of alternatives that comprehenders consider when inferring meaning.

Discerning conversational context in online health communities for personalized digital behavior change solutions using Pragmatics to Reveal Intent in Social Media (PRISM) framework.

BACKGROUND: Online health communities (OHCs) have emerged as prominent platforms for behavior modification, and the digitization of online peer interactions has afforded researchers with unique opportunities to model multilevel mechanisms that drive behavior change. Existing studies, however, have been limited by a lack of methods that allow the capture of conversational context and socio-behavioral dynamics at scale, as manifested in these digital platforms. OBJECTIVE: We develop, evaluate, and apply a novel methodological framework, Pragmatics to Reveal Intent in Social Media (PRISM), to facilitate granular characterization of peer interactions by combining multidimensional facets of human communication. METHODS: We developed and applied PRISM to analyze peer interactions (N = 2.23 million) in QuitNet, an OHC for tobacco cessation. First, we generated a labeled set of peer interactions (n = 2,005) through manual annotation along three dimensions: communication themes (CTs), behavior change techniques (BCTs), and speech acts (SAs). Second, we used deep learning models to apply our qualitative codes at scale. Third, we applied our validated model to perform a retrospective analysis. Finally, using social network analysis (SNA), we portrayed large-scale patterns and relationships among the aforementioned communication dimensions embedded in peer interactions in QuitNet. RESULTS: Qualitative analysis showed that the themes of social support and behavioral progress were common. The most used BCTs were feedback and monitoring and comparison of behavior, and users most commonly expressed their intentions using SAs-expressive and emotion. With additional in-domain pre-training, bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT) outperformed other deep learning models on the classification tasks. Content-specific SNA revealed that users' engagement or abstinence status is associated with the prevalence of various categories of BCTs and SAs, which also was evident from the visualization of network structures. CONCLUSIONS: Our study describes the interplay of multilevel characteristics of online communication and their association with individual health behaviors.

The difficulty of oral speech act production tasks in second language pragmatics testing.

This study examined the relative difficulty of oral speech act production tasks involving eight different types of speech acts for Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and the effects of three contextual variables, namely, power, social distance, and imposition, on such difficulty. Eight Oral Discourse Completion Task items, each representing a unique combination of the three contextual variables, were designed for each speech act. Eighty Chinese EFL learners responded to these items and their responses were rated for appropriateness by two native-speaking college English instructors. A Many-facet Rasch Measurement analysis suggested that the eight speech acts can be ordered by ascending difficulty as follows: Thank, Request, Suggestion, Disagreement, Invitation, Refusal, Offer, and Apology. Significant effects on performance scores were found for the interaction between each of the three contextual variables and speech act, and the specific effects observed varied by speech act. The implications of our findings for L2 pragmatics testing are discussed.

Helping Others to Understand: A Normative Account of the Speech Act of Explanation.

This paper offers a normative account of the speech act of explanation with understanding as its norm. The previous accounts of the speech act of explanation rely on the factive notion of understanding and maintain that proper explanations require knowledge. I argue, however, that such accounts are too demanding and do not reflect the everyday practice of explanation and the attribution of understanding. Instead, I argue that the non-factive, objectual attitude of understanding is sufficient for a proper explanation. On the normative level, explanations are governed by an audience-centred norm, i.e., they are sensitive to the epistemic position of the audience. According to the proposed account, an explanation is a communicative act in which one puts the audience in a position to understand the explained phenomenon. This proposal fits into the recent wave of applications of the normative account and makes space for the pluralism of illocutionary acts.

Linguistic signs in action: The neuropragmatics of speech acts.

What makes human communication exceptional is the ability to grasp speaker's intentions beyond what is said verbally. How the brain processes communicative functions is one of the central concerns of the neurobiology of language and pragmatics. Linguistic-pragmatic theories define these functions as speech acts, and various pragmatic traits characterise them at the levels of propositional content, action sequence structure, related commitments and social aspects. Here I discuss recent neurocognitive studies, which have shown that the use of identical linguistic signs in conveying different communicative functions elicits distinct and ultra-rapid neural responses. Interestingly, cortical areas show differential involvement underlying various pragmatic features related to theory-of-mind, emotion and action for specific speech acts expressed with the same utterances. Drawing on a neurocognitive model, I posit that understanding speech acts involves the expectation of typical partner follow-up actions and that this predictive knowledge is immediately reflected in mind and brain.

Directives in Covid-19 government guidance: an international comparison.

The importance of language to changing public behaviours is acknowledged in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. A key means of achieving these changes is through the use of directive speech acts, yet this area is currently under-researched. This study investigates the use of directives in the 2020 COVID-19 briefings of four leaders of English-speaking nations, Jacinda Adern, Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison, and Nicola Sturgeon. We developed a classification system including 13 directive types and used this to compare directive use across these four leaders, examining directness and forcefulness of directive use. The analysis finds Sturgeon to be the most prolific directive user and also to have the highest reliance on imperatives. Johnson, meanwhile, has a preference for directives involving modal verbs, particularly with first- and second-person pronouns. In contrast, Ardern and Morrison show a higher use of indirect directives, normally thought to be a less effective strategy. While Ardern often combines this strategy with judicious use of imperatives, this is not seen in Morrison's COVID-19 briefings. These findings tend to confirm earlier, more impressionistic evaluations of the communication styles of these leaders but also suggest other avenues for research on directive use. We conclude with implications for political crisis communication and analysis of directives in crisis communication.

Impact of instruction based on movie and TV series clips on EFL learners' pragmatic competence: Speech acts in focus.

This study attempts to investigate the role of movie and TV series clips in enhancing EFL learners' pragmatic competence by utilizing an experimental design. The sample of the study was 42 students from the English language department at Cihan University-Duhok, Iraq. The experiment lasted one academic semester. The participants' English language proficiency, as determined by an IELTS test sample, was intermediate, and then they were randomly split into two groups, namely experimental and control. Before and after the treatment, a Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) served as a pre-and post-test given to the two groups to assess statistically significant differences between them. The experimental group received direct instruction on request and suggestion speech acts via the presentation of the carefully chosen movie and TV series clips. In contrast, the control group was exposed to a minimal amount of pragmatics through printed texts. The findings demonstrated that the experimental group outperformed the control group. More precisely, the findings revealed that movie and TV series clips had a significant influence on learners' production of requests and suggestions. Considering the above findings, the researchers propose EFL teachers apply movie and TV series clips to improve their Students' pragmatic competence in class.