Audio blog, family portrait, and interpersonal whatnot

Blogger offers the option to post audio, but why do you have to call in the audio from a phone? I've got sound files I'd post but fuck the phone shit. Is this some kind of piracy thing? Sheeesh.

Ok to answer the comments questions:

1) The unfortunate family portrait incident
My father's side of the family is Irish and Italian but predominantly Italian in culture. Although there are six siblings (my dad plus 5) only two of them had kids, my dad and his brother Louie. Louie's kids are all girls, and my dad had two daughters and a boy. This meant that for most of my childhood, my sister and I were referred to as "the girls" at extended family gatherings, while our brother was lauded and hailed, given attention, money, and presents for simply existing. This continued through highschool (which my sister dropped out of) and college (which I dropped out of). By 1998, I got married, graduated, bought a house, and started a PhD program. Around the same time period, my brother came out, dropped out of law school, and acquired HIV. In 2000, my family had an extended family gathering. All six of the siblings were there, plus some cousins and second cousins and shit I hardly even knew existed. My dad, my sister, my husband, and I all attended. My brother did not. At this event, my aunt Claire (the oldest of the six) had hired a photographer who would take a big picture of all of us at exactly 6:00. She spent the whole day running around saying things like "the whole family is here!" and "Everyone is here! Oh it's so nice!" She and the rest of the relatives also spent the whole day sucking up to my doctor husband and asking me about grad school and my new house. NO ONE EVEN MENTIONED MY BROTHER. No one.

Picture time came and I had had a few. "Everyone" was arranged in the family room of Louie's house for the big portrait shot. I think if my aunt hadn't squealed yet again about "the whole family" I might have behaved myself. I might have been able to control that evil impulse. But she did it. "It'll be so nice to have a picture of the WHOLE family!" she said. And I, posed at my doctor husband's side with my hands folded femininely on his right shoulder, adjusted my fingers just so....
snap, click, snap, click, snap.

The pictures were taken. My sister came up to me after and said "Oh my god, you didn't! I can't believe you flipped off the camera!" I responded "yeah but only to one shot". Turns out that one shot was the one where everyone's eyes were open. The only one where everyone's eyes were open. And I RUINED THE ENTIRE FAMILY PORTRAIT OF THE WHOLE (except for our unmentionable relative Tony) FAMILY!!!!!

2) Interpersonal coordination
People imitate one another. We stand in the same postures as others around us, we gesture in the same way, if we are asked to stand in a lab and swing pendulums we swing in time to one another (even if we aren't asked to), and we pick up and reproduce even very small details of one another's speech. We do this to different degrees, mediated perhaps by social factors and personality, but it seems even when there is no apparent social gain we do it, and even when there is a social gain and we are imitating a lot, we often are completely unconscious of doing it (personally I love watching my faculty imitate one another's postures and hand positions during talks). Conscious or not, instances or this are called "interpersonal coordination", "entrainment", "convergence", "mimesis", and "imitation". There are slightly different shades of meaning to each term, but they can be grouped together as describing the same class of phenomenon of Monkey see (or hear), Monkey do.

One of the research projects I work on is using this tendency to imitate in speech as a way to investigate the nature of speech perception and the properties of the speech percept (or mental representation of speech/spoken words and sounds). The idea is, very generally, if you imitate a property, you must have perceived that property. The big deal is that most of the classic, traditional research on speech says that we perceive speech in terms of acoustic properties and that we strip away certain speaker specific elements of speech. By this account, when someone says "cat" or even a nonsense syllable like "ka" we are able to understand it because we can match it up with some abstract acoustic representation in our heads. The nature of the something in our heads is what is up for debate in my field, and while traditional accounts differ, they all tend to agree that the something in your head is 100% acoustic and abstract. You have some kind of acoustic template in there that "sounds like" "cat" or "ka" and when you hear "cat" or "ka" you know you heard it because it matched the acoustic properties of that entry (or of those sounds, i.e. "k" plus "a") in your mind.

This something in your head has to be abstract because we all say "cat" differently. In fact, each time you or I or anyone says "cat" we say it differently, at least from a purely acoustic point of view. But you can understand me saying "cat" if I say it with a cold, a sore throat, if I whisper it, if I have a mouthful of muffin (it's a little harder then but if it's not too much muffin you can understand me). So how the hell do you understand it if you have to match all those possible acoustic manifestations of "cat" with this one uber mental acoustic form of CAT in your head?

The theory I work in says that you perceive "cat" not in acoustic properties but in terms of the gestures the speaker made with his or her mouth, tongue, lips, glottis, etc. These properties vary but not as much as the acoustic ones do. This idea is also not new. Theories of recovering the event that made the signal, or inference, abound in the history of psychology and studies of mind. What is new and different is the idea that we perceive the event directly, and not through inference. We "hear" the acoustic consequence of gestures and we perceive in terms of the gesture that made that event. We do not extrapolate, we do not infer, we do not learn an association, we do not need to strip away the speaker specific acoustic properties. That last bit is important because while we might be said to imitate the "abstract" properties (in that we all learn the language we are raised in), we also imitate the not abstract properties (accent, style, voice quality, etc). We can account for that if we describe speech perception in terms of perception of the gestures because the process of "stripping away" so the acoustic input will match with the stored mental abstract acoustic form is not required.

Some people say this is silly, or that it's like magic. You hear sounds, not tongues, says one researcher.

The cool thing about the imitation stuff is that there are some neurological findings of structures and processes which could underly exactly this kind of silly magical perception. There has been a big fuss about what are called mirror neurons, which show activation when we watch another human engage in an action. This area shows activation when we see someone talking which would make sense because we are seeing a human perform an action. But it also shows activation when we listen to speech, which is interesting since it seems to support the idea that you perceive actions (speech gestures) in motor terms.

I'm doing speech research (no neuroimaging...the closest I got to the MRI was as a subject). I was looking for all this background research on imitation in speech as a way to preface our study on imitation in speech. Problem is, we fucked up the imitation study we did so I can't approach it the way we had planned. My advisor hates when I say this, but it's true. We fucked it up, so there isn't much to say in terms of what we perceive in speech or about what the cognitively relevant properties of the speech percept are. But there is something to say about imitation of actions in general, specifically, there is something to say about when and to what degree we imitate if we must extrapolate the action/gesture from the (acoustic) signal vs. when and to what degree we imitate if we perceive gestures directly. So I turned to the non-speech imitation papers and I found some really great stuff. And I am happy. I only hope my advisor is happy enough that she doesn't kill me for going over yet another deadline.