Despite their potential for facilitating interaction between a user and computer, an embodied agent and voice command have not been examined enough for their matching effects. The current study proposes that an embodied agent and voice command generate positive evaluative outcomes, particularly when they are accompanied by each other. To test this prediction, we conducted a 2 (visual output: embodied agent vs. geometric figure) × 2 (input modality: voice command vs. remote controller) between-subjects experiment (N = 52), (...) and examined whether visual output and input modality jointly influence participants’ social attribution (i.e., anthropomorphism, animacy, likability, and perceived intelligence), social presence, and satisfaction. Results show that voice command does facilitate users’ social attribution and social presence, but only when an embodied agent was presented. Also, the effects of voice command on social presence and satisfaction were mediated by anthropomorphism and perceived intelligence respectively, but only when the interface displayed an embodied agent. The present study evidences the holistic nature of human-computer interaction, revealing the importance of matches in the input and output interface. (shrink)

Young children are prolific question-askers. The growing ubiquity of voice interfaces (e.g., Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa), as well as the availability of voice input in search fields, now make it possible for children to ask questions via Internet search when they are able to speak clearly, but before they have learned to read and write, typically between 3 and 6 years of age. The prevalence of voice search makes it important to understand children’s changing conceptions of (...) digital devices as a source of information and the role of technology-mediated question-asking in development. While limited research has focused on young children's use of voice interfaces, reviewing two related bodies of literature sheds light on how this use might unfold. This paper brings together studies of how children look for information, and of how they perceive and understand the informational and social roles of technology, drawing on human-computer interaction research. We conclude by highlighting lines of questioning for future work on younger children’s interaction through voice search. (shrink)

Language and speech depend on a relatively well defined neural circuitry, located predominantly in the left hemisphere. In this article, I discuss the origin of the speech circuit in early humans, as an expansion of an auditory-vocal articulatory network that took place after the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee. I will attempt to converge this perspective with aspects of the Mirror System Hypothesis, particularly those related to the emergence of a meaningful grammar in human communication. Basically, the strengthening of (...) auditory-vocal connectivity via the arcuate fasciculus and related tracts generated an expansion of working memory capacity for vocalizations, that was key for learning complex utterances. This process was concomitant with the development of a robust interface with visual working memory, both in the dorsal and ventral streams of auditory and visual processing. This enabled the bidirectional translation of sequential codes into hierarchical visual representations, through the development of a multimodal interface between both systems. (shrink)

New types of artificial intelligence products are gradually transferring to voice interaction modes with the demand for intelligent products expanding from communication to recognizing users' emotions and instantaneous feedback. At present, affective acoustic models are constructed through deep learning and abstracted into a mathematical model, making computers learn from data and equipping them with prediction abilities. Although this method can result in accurate predictions, it has a limitation in that it lacks explanatory capability; there is an urgent need for (...) an empirical study of the connection between acoustic features and psychology as the theoretical basis for the adjustment of model parameters. Accordingly, this study focuses on exploring the differences between seven major “acoustic features” and their physical characteristics during voice interaction with the recognition and expression of “gender” and “emotional states of the pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) model.” In this study, 31 females and 31 males aged between 21 and 60 were invited using the stratified random sampling method for the audio recording of different emotions. Subsequently, parameter values of acoustic features were extracted using Praat voice software. Finally, parameter values were analyzed using a Two-way ANOVA, mixed-design analysis in SPSS software. Results show that gender and emotional states of the PAD model vary among seven major acoustic features. Moreover, their difference values and rankings also vary. The research conclusions lay a theoretical foundation for AI emotional voice interaction and solve deep learning's current dilemma in emotional recognition and parameter optimization of the emotional synthesis model due to the lack of explanatory power. (shrink)

Convivo is a VoIP system designed to provide reliable voice communication for poor quality networks, especially those found in rural areas of the developing world. Convivo introduces an original approach to maintain voice communication interaction in the presence of poor network performance: an Interface‐ Adaptation mechanism that adjusts the user interface to reduce the impact of high latency and low bandwidth networks. Interface modes facilitate turn taking for high latency connections, and help to sustain voice communication even (...) with extremely low bandwidth or high error rates. An evaluation of the system, conducted in a rural community in the Dominican Republic, found that Interface‐Adaptation helped users to maintain voice communication interaction as network performance degrades. Transitions from full duplex to voice messaging were found particularly valuable. Initial results suggest that as users get more experience with the application they would like to manually control transitions based on feedback provided by the application and their own perceived voice quality. (shrink)

Despite their potential for facilitating interaction between a user and computer, an embodied agent and voice command have not been examined enough for their matching effects. The current study proposes that an embodied agent and voice command generate positive evaluative outcomes, particularly when they are accompanied by each other. To test this prediction, we conducted a 2 (visual output: embodied agent vs. geometric figure) × 2 (input modality: voice command vs. remote controller) between-subjects experiment (N = 52), (...) and examined whether visual output and input modality jointly influence participants’ social attribution (i.e., anthropomorphism, animacy, likability, and perceived intelligence), social presence, and satisfaction. Results show that voice command does facilitate users’ social attribution and social presence, but only when an embodied agent was presented. Also, the effects of voice command on social presence and satisfaction were mediated by anthropomorphism and perceived intelligence respectively, but only when the interface displayed an embodied agent. The present study evidences the holistic nature of human-computer interaction, revealing the importance of matches in the input and output interface. (shrink)

This study investigated how coda voicing contrast in English would be phonetically encoded in the temporal vs. spectral dimension of the preceding vowel (in vowel duration vs. F1/F2) by Korean L2 speakers of English, and how their L2 phonetic encoding pattern would be compared to that of native English speakers. Crucially, these questions were explored by taking into account the phonetics-prosody interface, testing effects of prominence by comparing target segments in three focus conditions (phonological focus, lexical focus, and no focus) (...) that stem from information structure. Results showed that Korean speakers utilized the temporal dimension (vowel duration) to encode coda voicing contrast, but failed to use the spectral dimension (F1/F2), reflecting their native language experience—i.e., with a more sparsely populated vowel space in Korean, they are less sensitive to small changes in the spectral dimension, and hence fine-grained spectral cues in English are not readily accessible. Results also showed that along the temporal dimension, both the L1 and L2 speakers hyperarticulated coda voicing contrast under prominence (when phonologically or lexically focused), but hypoarticulated it in the non-prominent condition. This indicates that low-level phonetic realization and high-order information structure interact in a communicatively efficient way, regardless of the speakers’ native language background. The Korean speakers, however, used the temporal phonetic space differently from the way the native speakers did, especially showing less reduction in the no focus condition. This was also attributable to their native language experience—i.e., the Korean speakers’ use of temporal dimension is constrained in a way that is not detrimental to the preservation of coda voicing contrast, given that they fail to add additional cues along the spectral dimension. The results imply that the L2 phonetic system can be more fully illuminated through an investigation of the phonetics-prosody interface that is further modulated by higher-order linguistic structure such as information structure as well as by the L2 speakers’ native language experience. (shrink)

This paper examines evidentiality and epistemic modality in Quechua narrative discourse from the central highlands of Peru. Huamalíes Quechua falls into the broad Quechua ‘I’ dialect grouping established by Alfredo Torero ; evidential usage here can be compared to that of southern Conchucos Quechua as studied by Diane and Daniel Hintz while it differs in interesting ways from the Quechua ‘II’ dialects of southern Peru as studied by Faller. The analysis focuses on an orally performed traditional narrative that deals with (...) the theme of social interaction between a human protagonist and a spirit being of the ‘other world’. It describes the human protagonist’s gradual realization of the nature of the spirit being with whom he has become involved; evidential and epistemic markings grammatically structure this transition from conjecture, to supposition, to direct witness. The aim is to show how the story’s cultural content, and the way in which evidentials and epistemic modality are operationalized, are mutually entailing. Form and content taken together throw light both on how evidentiality and epistemic modality work in social interaction and on how Amerindian understandings of the interface between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ worlds, and between ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, inform grammatical usage. (shrink)

Drawing on political philosophy and theology, theory and practice, this essay collection tackles the complex questions arising from the interface of religion and public life. Includes critical analyses of theorists Rawls, Stout and Habermas, and discussion of key issues such as religious education and human rights.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 187-189 [Access article in PDF] Blue Jean Buddha: Voices Of Young Buddhists. Edited by Sumi Loundon. Foreword by Jack Kornfield. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001. xxi + 234 pp. Blue Jean Buddha is not the name of one of this year's short-lived pop sit-coms nor is it a trendy apparel statement. You will not find low-rise, hip-hugging jeans and navel-studded co-eds in this collection of lively (...) and articulate essays by young American Buddhists in their late twenties and early thirties. (But then again you might have found them if today's teen Buddhists were represented!) Blue Jean Buddha is highly readable and mind-opening to those unfamiliar with the growth of Buddhist communities and practitioner networks in North America as well as for text and church-bound academicians of Buddhist-Christian discourse.Blue Jean Buddha:Voices of Young Buddhists is a medley of twenty-nine upbeat and down-home personal testimonies of mostly Westerners who were raised as Buddhists in the United States or who converted early on in life. The book is divided into four parts: Lessons, Life Stories, Livelihood, and Reflections. Refreshingly immediate introductory pages (really a series of questions!) and the concluding Reflections are offered by editor Sumi Loundon, an artist and graduate of Harvard Divinity School and former chair of the Harvard Buddhist Community. Sumi herself was born into a small Zen community in rural New Hampshire, practiced vipassana for years and is now committed to the Buddhist traditions of Korea, where I first met her at a temple in Seoul. She is planning to come out with a second volume of essays by more representatives of America's fertile Buddhist garden in 2004.The essays in Blue Jean Buddha are a cornucopia of commentary and questions about the reception of Buddhism in the West, the spiritual odysseys of exceptional young seekers, and thoughtful ruminations on the transformative effects of dharma practice for personal and social change. These are the voices of American Buddhism at its grassroots, in the lives of young Buddhists as they are actually living it. One contributor, Elijah, age twenty-eight, was recognized as a tulku by the Dalai Lama when he was eight; another voice is Hanuman, twenty-four, a musician and proud "Bu-Hin-Chris-Jew" whose senior performance was called "The Mind Is a Belligerent Puppy—Easy to Train, Difficult to Discipline." Yet another contributor is Liane, a Japanese American Jodo Shinshu follower, thirty-three, whose faith was tested after she became paralyzed from the neck down in an automobile accident when she was twenty.Blue Jean Buddha is one of those versatile books you can recommend to almost anyone you meet to introduce them to the living practice of Buddhism in contemporary America. The personal vignettes are short, compelling, and easy to read on a plane, on a bus, or at your bedside. College students at all levels will enjoy it because of the open spirit with which it is presented. It asks many leading questions about [End Page 187] Buddhism and the nature of spiritual life in general. Readers will be happily surprised, remarking, "Hey! I was there, too! That's what I was thinking!" You can read and reread it many times and still get some new personal insight out of it. I certainly did, assisting my wife, Jinsuk Lim, preparing a Korean translation of the book. A best-seller among Eastern spiritual titles distributed by Amazon.com and Shambhala, the Korean version sold very well in Buddhist and more intellectually progressive circles. Those conversant with Buddhist studies in general as well as meditation and transpersonal psychology will recognize a few familiar surnames; candid and compassionate offspring of illustrious parents have contributed to Blue Jean Buddha. I will leave it to SBCS members in the know to seek out and identify them!As for the interface of Buddhist and Christian beliefs and interfaith practice of concern to our seasoned readers, let us allow editor Sumi Loundon to offer her musings from her own youthful experience: The essays in this book... (shrink)

In 2004, Robert Nelson noted in creative, practice-led research degrees that the exegesis had been reconceptualised as a cultural contribution to scholarship. He suggested that the challenge this posed was the need for writing to interface effectively with the nature and calibre of the creative work. A decade on from his observation, this article employs a case study to discuss emerging approaches to the exegesis in the work of graphic design doctoral candidates at AUT University in New Zealand. Accepting the (...) multi-perspectival and multi-voiced nature of the practice-led exegesis writer, it discusses approaches to both structure and presentation. In so doing, it also considers specific issues, including negotiated relationships between the role and the nature of the designer’s voice, systems of narration, and issues impacting upon both digital and print formats. (shrink)

The article concentrates on answering the main question to be addressed, as stated in its title: which psychology serves us best? In order to achieve this goal, we pursue possible answers in history of psychology of religion and its interdisciplinary relationships with its sister disciplines, anthropology of religion and religious studies, resulting with sketching a typology of the main attitudes towards conceptualising psycho-cultural interface, prevalent among psychologists: the Universalist, the Absolutist and the Relativist stances. Next chosen examples from the field (...) of applied psychology are presented, as the role of the cultural factor within the history of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ development is discussed alongside presenting research on the phenomenon of ‘hearing voices’, in order to show the marked way for the future – the importance of including the cultural factor in psychological research on religion. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence in all its developments is advancing faster than the capacity of institutions and organizations to offer legal, but also deontological responses: assuming the ethical implications of the new digital scenarios where technology learns from human routines to personalize content is fundamental from the academic, politicy and business spheres. This paper offers an interpretative framework of the evolution of smart speakers and voice assistants as tools for information singularization in parallel to the study of the European framework for (...) the creation of an ethics of ai. The results show an effort by institutions to respond to an unstoppable progress and demonstrate that ai cannot be addressed by legal regulation alone but is above all a matter of ethical preference. (shrink)

Semitic templates systematically encode two dimensions of verb meaning: (a) agency, the thematic role of the verb’s external argument, and (b) voice. The assumption that this form-meaning correspondence is mediated by syntax allows the parallel compositional construction of the form and the meaning of a verb from the forms and the meanings of its root and template. The root and its arguments are optionally embedded under a light verb v which introduces the agent (Hale and Keyser 1993; Kratzer 1994). (...) But this is only the unmarked case, which, in Semitic, is encoded by the simple templates. Two dimensions of markedness are introduced by two additional types of syntactic heads: (a) agency heads, which modify agency and are morphologically realized as the intensive and causative templates, and (b) voice heads, which modify voice and are morphologically realized as the passive and middle templates. Causative and middle morphemes are thus accounted for within a unified system, which, first, explains their affinity in language in general (both are found crosslinguistically as markers of transitivity alternations), and which, moreover, sheds new light on problems in the interface of semantics and morphology. One problem is the impossibility, mostly ignored in linguistic theory, of deriving the semantics of middle verbs from that of the corresponding transitive verbs. The second is explaining the identity found crosslinguistically between middle and reflexive morphology. The third is determining the grammatical function of the causee in causative constructions. (shrink)

What constitutes our human capacity to engage and be in the same frame of mind as another human? How do we come to share a sense of what ‘looks good’ and what ‘makes sense’? How do we handle differences and come to coexist with them? How do we come to feel that we understand what someone else is experiencing? How are we able to walk in silence with someone familiar and be sharing a peaceful space? All of these aspects are (...) part of human ‘interaction’. In designing interactive technologies designers have endeavoured to explicate, analyse and simulate, our capacity for social adaptation. Their motivations are mixed and include the desires to improve efficiency, improve consumption, to connect people, to make it easier for people to work together, to improve education and learning. In these endeavours to explicate, analyse and simulate, there is a fundamental human capacity that is beyond technology and that facilitates these aspects of being, feeling and thinking with others. That capacity, we suggest, is human entrainment. This is our ability to coordinate the timing of our behaviours and rhythmically synchronise our attentional resources. Expressed within the movements of our bodies and voices, it has a quality that is akin to music. In this paper, disparate domains of research such as pragmatics, social psychology, behaviourism, cognitive science, computational linguistics, gesture, are brought together, and considered in light of the developments in interactive technology, in order to shape a conceptual framework for understanding entrainment in everyday human interaction. (shrink)

_Education as Mutual Translation_ examines Hindu Vedantist and Yoruba philosophical concepts of self and mutuality with others, in a contemporary higher art education context. It suggests that resilient, original voices emerge more successfully from awareness of social interactions, than from individualism.

This book is a critical examination of certain basic issues and themes crucial to understanding how ethics currently interfaces with health care and biomedical research. Beginning with an overview of the field, it proceeds through a delineation of such key notions as trust and uncertainty, dialogue involving talk and listening, the vulnerability of the patient against the asymmetric power of the health professional, along with professional and individual responsibility. It emphasizes several themes fundamental to ethics and health care: (1) (...) the work of ethics requires strict focus on the specific situational understanding of each involved person. (2) Moral issues, at least those intrinsic to each clinical encounter, are presented solely within the contexts of their actual occurrence; therefore, ethics must not only be practical but empirical in its approach. (3) Each particular situation is in its own way imprecise and uncertain, and the different types and dimensions of imprecision and uncertainty are critical for everyone involved. (4) Finally, medicine and health care more broadly are governed by the effort to make sense of the healer's experiences with the patient, whose own experiences and interpretations are ingredient to what the healer seeks to understand and eventually treat. In addition to providing a way to develop ethical considerations in clinical life and research projects, the book proposes that narratives provide the finest way to state and grapple with these themes and issues, whether in classrooms or real-life situations. It concludes with a prospective analysis of newly emerging issues presented by and within the new genetics, which, together within a focus on the phenomenon of birth, leads to an clearer understanding of human life. (shrink)

IDEAS EXPLAINEDTM Daoism Explained, Hans-Georg Moeller Frege Explained, Joan Weiner Luhmann Explained, Hans-Georg Moeller Heidegger Explained, Graham Harman Atheism Explained, David Ramsay Steele Sartre Explained, ...

What can Hannah Arendt's writings offer to current thinking on the environment? Although there are some obvious connections between her work and current issues in environmental ethics, not very much has been written on the topic. This article argues that Arendt's philosophy is particularly fruitful for environmental thinking because she explicitly links the material and biological conditions of human existence with the political conditions of human freedom. This is articulated in the article as the requirement of both constrained consumption and (...) unconstrained deliberation. The article elaborates these notions before concluding that Arendt's philosophy uniquely combines the existential task of self-understanding with the practical task of confronting our environmental challenges. (shrink)

Is there a principled way to understand what liberal democratic states owe, as a matter of justice, to the victims of disasters? This article shows what is normatively special and distinctive about disasters and argues for the view that there are substantial duties of justice for liberal democratic states. The article rejects both a libertarian and a utilitarian approach to this question and, based on broadly Rawlsian principles, argues for a ‘political definition’ of disasters that is concerned with the restoration (...) of citizens' dignity and their capacities for effective citizenship. (shrink)

The paper is a response to Russell Daylight’s “In the Name of Democracy”. I argue that Daylight’s postmodernist approach to the question of democracy is flawed in several respects. First, he interprets the claim that the meaning of democracy is open to entail that there can be no closure when democratic norms are in dispute. I argue that normative closure is not only essential but also necessary to democratic practice, in particular for democratic legitimacy. I reject the claim that normative (...) closure requires transcendental truths or dubious metaphysical commitments. Second, I critically examine Daylight’s positive proposal for “language-citizens.” I end by offering a sketch of a theory of democratic legitimacy that I believe evades the charges that Daylight and postmodernists offer against normative democratic theory. (shrink)

Drone warfare disrupts the generally understood experience of war, and drone operators’ distance from the battlefield has called into question the authenticity of their experiences as participants in conflict. This article examines the autobiographies of three US military drone operators, analysing how the narration is discursively oriented to particular spatial and ideological perspectives. It argues that the linguistic construction of point of view in each text reflects a dynamic and sometimes paradoxical relationship between drone operators and their distance from the (...) battlefield. Observing the position and shifting of deictic centres, the analysis draws parallels between spatial perspective, ideology, and the social identities of drone operators and victims of drone strikes. It concludes by reflecting on the variety of discursive strategies employed across these texts, and considers this variation itself to be an emerging trend in the discourse of drone warfare. (shrink)

This book argues for moral contractarianism, the view that moral justification rests on the idea of agreement. It critically appraises the views of contemporary contractarians such as John Rawls, David Gauthier, and Thomas Scanlon. It argues for a theory of moral justification that is based on a hypothetical agreement of restricted scope between strangers in the circumstances of justice and that is bound by historical place and circumstance.

The meaning of privacy has been frequently disputed in the philosophical and -/- legal literature since Warren and Brandeis first argued for it as a distinct and -/- important personal and social value. Nevertheless, while the meaning of privacy -/- is held to be vague, there is general agreement that Warren and Brandeis were -/- correct in their assessment of its value. Theorists of democracy, on the other hand, -/- have been ambivalent towards the realm of the private. This paper (...) interrogates the -/- intersection between privacy and democracy, questioning the place of privacy as a -/- distinctly democratic value. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that David Gauthier’s answer to the Why be moral? question fails. My argument concedes the possibility of constrained maximization in all the senses Gauthier intends and does not rely on the claim that it is better to masquerade as a constrained maximizer than to be one. Instead, I argue that once a constrained maximizer in the guise of "economic man" is transformed through an affective commitment to morality into a constrained maximizer in the guise of (...) the "liberal individual," then a purely rational justification for morality must become invisible to the latter. If I can show this, then I can show that rational justification can have no motivational power for the "liberal individual" and that Gauthier fails to answer the problem of moral motivation. (shrink)

This paper argues that the categorical authority of love’s imperatives is derived from a sentimental contract. The problem is defined and the paper argues against two recent attempts to explain the authority of love’s demands by Velleman and Frankfurt. An argument is then set out in which it is shown that a constructivist approach to the problem explains the sources of love’s justifications. The paper distinguishes between the moral and the romantic case but argues that the sources of authority are (...) paralleled in each. The paper ends by asking what we are to say when the demands of morality and the demands of love conflict. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that noise is a significant source of social harm and those harmed by noise often suffer not merely a misfortune but an injustice. I argue that noise is a problem of justice in two ways; firstly, noise is a burden of social cooperation and so the question of the distribution of this burden arises. And, secondly, some noises, although burdensome, are nevertheless just because they arise from practices that are ‘reasonable’. I offer a number of (...) distinctions, between necessary and unnecessary noise, between public and private noise and between reasonable and unreasonable noise. What justice requires will differ according to what kind of noise we consider. My purpose is to give normative urgency to the problem of noise by understanding certain instances of it as not merely annoyances and nuisances but instances of injustice. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that noise is a significant source of social harm and thoseharmed by noise often suffer not merely a misfortune but an injustice. I arguethat noise is a problem of justice in two ways; firstly, noise is a burden of socialcooperation and so the question of the distribution of this burden arises. And,secondly, some noises, although burdensome, are nevertheless just becausethey arise from practices that are ‘reasonable’. I offer a number of distinctions,between necessary and unnecessary noise, (...) between public and private noiseand between reasonable and unreasonable noise. What justice requires willdiffer according to what kind of noise we consider. My purpose is to give normativeurgency to the problem of noise by understanding certain instances ofit as not merely annoyances and nuisances but instances of injustice. (shrink)