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Communicative acts and phrase length in role‐play sessions

7  Evaluation of Phrases 2: Role‐play

7.3  Results

7.3.2  Communicative acts and phrase length in role‐play sessions

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It is important to remember that it is possible to store expressions in the keyboard devices Lightwriter and SpeakOut too, as well as it is possible to put Phrases 2 in a small portable computer with a regular keyboard. For the purpose of the study, these two features were separated so that no phrases were stored in SpeakOut and the participants used the on-screen keyboard with Phrases 2.

Apart from the participant’s choice of expressions in the two excerpts there is also another difference that may have influenced the way she expressed herself with the two devices, and that is the fact that the customer is served by two different shop assistants with different attitudes and different personalities. We can see in the excerpts that shop assistant 1 is much more talkative than shop assistant 2. Maybe that was also a reason for C to be briefer in the first example - she had to hurry to be able to say something before the shop assistant started talking again.

From these and other conversations in the role-play sessions, it was evident that there was a certain amount of stress involved in using the VOCAs. Being fast enough to be able to take the turn was one issue, with the keyboard VOCAs especially, but searching for something to say in the Phrases 2 vocabulary, not knowing what to find seemed to be another stressful event. In these situations some of the participants turned directly to the keyboard instead.

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o 4 specification, e.g. Gult (Yellow), Bläckfisken (The octopus)

• 8 other expressions, e.g. Det kan vänta (That can wait), Jaha (Well).

In nine other shop conversations where the same 5 role-play customers used a

keyboard-based VOCA without pre-stored utterances, they produced 80 utterances:

• 7 greetings: Hej (Hello), Hej då (Goodbye)

• 19 requests, whereof:

o 11 requests for item, e.g. Kan du ta dem (Could you take them), Jag vill ha ett rosa (I want a pink one), Fem Dumlekola (Five Dumle caramels)

o 7 requests for information, e.g. Hur mycket kostar de (How much are they), Vi undrar vad är det (We wonder what it is), Vad (What).

o 1 request for help: Kan du hjälpa mig att handla (Could you help me shop)

• 31 expressions of feedback in an extended sense, whereof:

o 7 acknowledgements: Tack (Thank you).

o 14 affirmations, e.g. Ja (Yes), Ja OK (Yes OK), Ja det gör vi (Yes let’s do that)

o 5 rejections/denials, Nej (No), Nä (No)

o 5 appraisals, e.g. Bra (Good), Svårt (Difficult), Det var dyrt (That was expensive)

• 16 provisions of information, whereof:

o 11 informing, e.g. Tror att barnen gillar kaninerna (Think the children will like the rabbits), Armband (Bracelet), Jag bara tittar lite (I’m just looking)

o 5 specification, e.g. Tre av varje (Three of each), Red (Röd)

• 7 other expressions, e.g. Kanske en mössa (Maybe a cap), Bara tänkte (Just thought)

The total length of the Phrases 2 conversations, including looking around the shop and handling artefacts was 35.4 minutes. The total length of the conversations with

keyboard-based VOCAs was 31.1 minutes, so the customers on average stayed a little bit shorter time in the shops on those occasions. It means that with Phrases 2, the customers produced an average of 3.75 utterances/minute and with the keyboard devices they produced 2.57 utterances/minute.

A comparison between the communicative acts produced with the two types of VOCAs can be seen in figure 7. 1. It shows that the total amount of greetings, requests and feedbacks was higher with Phrases 2 than with the keyboard VOCAs, while the groups Provision of information and Other were about the same. Since the total number of expressions differ, it is hard to see in figure 7.1 if the distribution of speech acts within each group also varies. In figure 7.2 we can see that the proportion of greetings and

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requests are the same, but that the percentage of feedback was higher and the percentage of provision of information was lower in the Phrases 2 conversations.

Figure 7.1. Utterances produced in 9+9 shop conversations by the same 5 participants. 

 

Figure 7.2. The distribution of speech acts within the 9 conversations where Phrases 2 was used and  the 9 conversations where keyboard‐based VOCAs were used by the same participants.  

 

Phrase length in the VOCA conversaions 

In the examples earlier in this chapter, the customer used shorter phrases with the SpeakOut device than with Phrases 2. To see if this was a trend that could be seen in more conversations, the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) was calculated for the two groups.

Although the MLU varied among the different conversations, the mean MLU for the 9 conversations in each group did not. The mean MLU for the Phrases 2 conversations was 2.48 and for the keyboard-based VOCA conversations it was 2.44.

If we instead look at the phrase lengths within the two groups, we see that the total number of utterances is higher in each group for the utterances produced with Phrases 2.

Figure 7.4 gives us the distribution, and we see then that about half the utterances in both groups are one-word utterances, but that there seems to be a trend toward longer utterances with the Phrases 2 vocabulary.

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Speakout/Lightwriter Phrases v.2

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Speakout/Lightwriter

Phrases v.2 Greeting

Request Feedback+

Prov info

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Figure7.3. The length of the utterances produced with the two types of VOCAs. 

 

Figure 7.4. The proportion of utterances of varying length, produced with the two types of VOCAs by  the five participants in the 9 + 9 role‐play shop conversations 

 

Communicative acts in more conversations with Phrases 2 

In addition to the nine role-play shop conversations reported earlier in this section, Phrases 2 was used in seven other shop conversations in about the same setting as the others. Three of these conversations were from the same role-play activity, the other four from a similar event. This additional group of 7 conversations is called Group B.

 

Figure 7.5. Mean number of Speech acts produced in 9 conversations with SpeakOut or Lightwriter,  9 conversations with Phrases 2 and 7 additional conversations with Phrases 2 

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

1 word 2 words 3 words 4 or more

Keyboard devices Phrases v.2

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Keyboard devices

Phrases v.2 1 word

2 words 3 words 4 or more

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Speakout/Lightwriter Phrases 2, Group A Phrases 2, Group B

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In order to see if the trend for the Phrases 2 conversations was replicated in these additional conversations, the average number of speech acts of each kind was calculated for the three conditions. In Figure 7.5 we can see that the trend with more requests and feedback expressions with the Phrases 2 seems to hold.