Salience in spoken language
November 1st, 2007
As any one who has been to recent lectures of mine knows, I have been going on for quite a long time now about the differences between salience in written language and salience in spoken language. By salience I mean how observable something is. I have now been sent, by Dennis Delany from Excel College, a superb article by someone called Steve Tauroza who is or was Senior Lecturer in the Department of English of the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and clearly something of an expert on salience in spoken language. The article concerned is entitled ‘Recognizing the Negative Particle in Speech: Problems and Implications’ and he makes the point which I have developed in my lectures, that negative particles are often not heard, with, of course, potentially disastrous results - ‘The yellow wire must(n’t) touch the red wire.’ Mr Tauroza goes on to make two other extremely important points. Firstly, he says that teachers often don’t think there is any problem in perceiving the negative particle (after all, it is easy to see in written language - my idea, not his) . Secondly, he says that non-perception of a negative early in a text may lead to listeners constructing a false scenario and then finding it difficult to fit later information into it.
My solution to this issue is NOT trying to enable students to perceive the negative particle - this is futile. Rather, we should focus on showing students what other features appear in a negative sentence. Some examples:
With ‘can’t‘ the vowel is longer (at least in British English!)
With ‘wouldn’t‘, you only hear ‘would’ if the sentence is negative; otherwise it’s generally elided to ‘d’
With negatives of irregular past tense verbs, you only hear the infinitive if the verb is negative. (This is useful because, in real life, we normally know that a person is talking about the past before we are called upon to determine whether a verb is positive or negative.
There are other markers of the presence of the negative as well, including:
at all - I don’t go there at all
but to show that the coming information contrasts - I went there but I didn’t see him
even - You mustn’t even move.
The point is - let’s teach students to recognise the features of negation other than the negative particle and then they should be able to infer the presence of the particle even if they can’t hear it.
November 3rd, 2007 at 8:31 am
Your point about the vowel in “can’t” set me musing as to how we would know the difference between an American saying “I can do that for you” and “I can’t do that for you”. I dont have any empirical evidence to hand, but I suspect that there would be a significant difference in the stress pattern (that topic again!). More importantly, in a face-to-face situation, there would be paralinguistic features and body language to underline the verbal meaning. One problem is that, as teachers constrained by available technology, we tend to teach listening primarily through audio recordings. (Are we teaching only for listening to the radio, or for phone conversations?) While, even within this limitation, there are strategies to be taught (such as you suggest, but also conversational skils such as asking for clarification - though these do not apply in, for example, listening to a lecture), is it not also important that students are exposed to authentic video, so that non-verbal features can be used to assist comprehension?
November 3rd, 2007 at 4:37 pm
I think the point about perception in real life is that there are many context and co-text clues, including as you say paralinguistic features but also what we know about a person and what they have just said / say immediately after a problematic utterance. One broad issue which I think we should teach more is the way that native speakers pick up the broad discourse structure of a turn from the early signpost language and use that to disambiguate. There will always be more than one indicator of a particular point - like negation - and we need to teach students what all of them are - semiotics, paralinguistics, discourse structure, grammatical structure, phrase structure.
November 4th, 2007 at 6:41 am
Im sure there’s a trap for teachers (that I often fall into, no doubt) of paying too much attention to language at the sentence level with early-stage learners. I think what you are saying is that such students also need plenty of (targeted) experience of longer texts (with features of authentic discourse), and I would agree completely. To its credit, SiE appears to offer this experience rather well. But we could perhaps make more use of new video technology to provide more visual experience for students and complement the kind of purely linguistic strategies you talk about in your original post. (Im sure people are already doing this, in fact.)
November 4th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
You’re right. We learnt quite a long time ago to get above the sentence level for reading but I think for listening there is still a danger to work too much at the micro level.
You are also absolutely right about the need to see at the same time as hearing. I think we have made listening 10 times harder for students by focusing on audio tapes. In the next edition of Skills, we will make extensive use of video. Of course, even without the technology, teachers can show semiotics after they have used the purely audio material but it is by no means ideal and hopeless for non-native speaker teachers, by and large.