Recent Submissions

  • Person reference and a preference for association in emergency calls

    Tennent, Emma; Weatherall, Ann; Victoria University of Wellington; University of Bedfordshire (Routledge, 2024-02-12)
    Person reference is pervasive in talk. Conversation analytic work has identified preferences in person reference relating to recognitional reference. However, the principles shaping non-recognitional reference are less well understood. We propose a preference for association in an institutional setting where recognition is not relevant. Our data are calls to the New Zealand police emergency line which were institutionally classified as family harm. Using a collection methodology, we found that non-recognitional person reference typically takes the form my x which directly associates speaker and referent, for example “my partner”, “my ex-partner”, “my dad”. Initial references that suggest no association (e.g. “someone” or “an abusive guy”) were subsequently revised by callers using self-repair or targeted by call-takers through questions that seek clarification about association. The shifts from non-associative to associative references demonstrate participants’ orientations to the relevance of association and are evidence of a preference for association in the setting under examination. Data are in English.
  • Digital rhythm training improves reading fluency in children

    Zanto, Theodore P.; Giannakopoulou, Anastasia; Gallen, Courtney L.; Ostrand, Avery E.; Younger, Jessica W.; Anguera-Singla, Roger; Anguera, Joaquin A.; Gazzaley, Adam; ; University of California-San Francisco; et al. (Wiley, 2024-01-09)
    Musical instrument training has been linked to improved academic and cognitive abilities in children, but it remains unclear why this occurs. Moreover, access to instrument training is not always feasible, thereby leaving less fortunate children without opportunity to benefit from such training. Although music-based video games may be more accessible to a broader population, research is lacking regarding their benefits on academic and cognitive performance. To address this gap, we assessed a custom-designed, digital rhythm training game as a proxy for instrument training to evaluate its ability to engender benefits in math and reading abilities. Furthermore, we tested for changes in core cognitive functions related to math and reading to inform how rhythm training may facilitate improved academic abilities. Classrooms of 8-9 year old children were randomized to receive either 6 weeks of rhythm training (N = 32) or classroom instruction as usual (control; N = 21). Compared to the control group, results showed that rhythm training improved reading, but not math, fluency. Assessments of cognition showed that rhythm training also led to improved rhythmic timing and language-based executive function (Stroop task), but not sustained attention, inhibitory control, or working memory. Interestingly, only the improvements in rhythmic timing correlated with improvements in reading ability. Together, these results provide novel evidence that a digital platform may serve as a proxy for musical instrument training to facilitate reading fluency in children, and that such reading improvements are related to enhanced rhythmic timing ability and not other cognitive functions associated with reading performance.
  • Re-visions of gender and language research in the 21st century

    Weatherall, Ann; Holmes, Janet; Victoria University of Wellington (Victoria University Press, 2000-01-01)
  • Introducing Sex and the Body: Feminist scholarship from ‘down under’ on sexuality, gender and embodiment

    Potts, Annie; Gavey, Nicola; Weatherall, Ann; Victoria University of Wellington (Dunmore Press, 2004-01-01)
  • Gender and Identity: Representation and Social Action

    Weatherall, Ann; Gallois, Cindy; Holmes, Janet; Meyerhoff, Miriam; Victoria University of Wellington; University of Queensland (Blackwell, 2003-01-01)
  • Gender and sexuality

    Weatherall, Ann; Wilson, Marc Stewart; Harper, David; McDowall, John; Victoria University of Wellington (Pearson Education New Zealand, 2006-12-05)
  • Language and communication

    Weatherall, Ann; Wilson, Marc Stewart; Harper, David; McDowall, John; Victoria University of Wellington (Pearson Education New Zealand, 2006-12-05)
  • A Feminist Discourse Analysis of Sex `Work'

    Weatherall, Ann; Priestley, Anna; Victoria University of Wellington (Sage, 2001-08-01)
    The present research investigates how explanations for sex `work', and constructions of it as a market exchange just like any other, function to reinforce and perpetuate the current shape of the sex industry in New Zealand. It also examines how key themes in feminist theories of sex work are used by participants to account for their experiences in the job. The data were from semi-structured interviews with 19 people who were working, or who had worked, in the sex industry. The sample was diverse in terms of gender and sexuality identifications. There was also diversity in the areas of sex work that had been experienced. The analysis takes a feminist discursive psychology approach that investigates the contradictions and dilemmas raised by different constructions of social objects. Insights that emerged from the analysis include that the construction of sex work as a service industry relies, in part, on the notion of an uncontrollable male sex drive; that the idea of sex work as an ordinary market exchange both highlights and hides important features of the sex industry; and that participants could account for both the violent and liberatory aspects of sex work that feature in feminist explanations.
  • Language and Social Interaction: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

    Weatherall, Ann; Gallois, Cynthia; Pittam, Jeffery; Victoria University of Wellington; University of Queensland (Taylor & Francis, 2016-05-18)
    The Language and Social Interaction Division of the International Communication Association attracts a membership from a wide range of disciplines. The unifying concern of language and social interaction (LSI) researchers is to understand how communication works through the empirical study of everyday language use and talk in social interaction. This essay, along with Sanders, Fitch, and Pomerantz’s contribution to this volume in Chapter 17, describes the distinctive features of LSI research. This chapter sketches four major approaches to the field: conversation analysis, ethnography of communication, discourse analysis, and language and social psychology. The present state of theory and research is considered under the broad headings of power and identity, central concerns of LSI researchers. The tensions that emerge as a result of the different perspectives and commitments of LSI scholars are considered, and a research agenda aimed at resolving these tensions is outlined.
  • Theoretical and methodological approaches to language and discourse in social psychology

    Weatherall, Ann; Gallois, Cindy; Watson, Bernadette; Victoria University of Wellington; University of Queensland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007-03-26)
    This book contains a range of chapters in the area of language and discourse, all from scholars who identify with the broad concerns of the field of social psychology. The study of language in social psychology has a long history, going back to close observational work of language done from the 1930s on (see Ball, Gallois & Callan, 1989; Markel, 1998). Nevertheless, language and discourse have for a long time been located away from the mainstream of social psychology. Not too many years ago, it was common for senior social psychologists to ask what contribution the study of language, the most social of all human behaviours, could make to social psychology or to psychology more generally. This may be because, as Ball et al. note, the rise of social cognition meant a loss of focus within social psychology on actual behaviour, and a privileging, or arguably even reifying, of thoughts, beliefs and cognitive processes. Thus, it is fair to say that the approach of language and social psychology came from social psychology, in that researchers in one way or another emphasize social-psychological themes like motivation, attitudes, and beliefs. At the same time, however, it can also be said that language and social psychology came out of social psychology, as a reaction to the increasingly intra-personal and cognitivist bias of that field in the 1970s and 1980s. So, the study of language and discourse in social psychology also owes great theoretical and methodological debts to sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and communication studies (see Gallois, McKay & Pittam, 2004).
  • Sustaining resilience of healthcare workers and leaders during a pandemic: a protocol to support coping during the Covid-19 pandemic

    Kasdovasilis, Pavlos; Cook, Neil; Montasem, Alexander; (Taylor and Francis, 2023-09-14)
    Objective: One way healthcare organisations can support their staff is through supervision. Supervision is typically defined as a process in which professionals receive support and guidance from more experienced colleagues. In this brief review we propose a tailored protocol for supporting support workers during a pandemic. Method: We collected narrative data from difference sources including a systematic meta ethnography and used expert advise in order to tailor the protocol. Results: This protocol can be used by management teams (e.g., senior support workers, team leaders, registered managers, and operation managers) without any prior experience of supervision. The protocol suggested includes a template with easy-to-follow instructions. Conclusions: It provides an easy step-by-step guide that simplifies the process whilst maintaining the depth needed to ensure effective supervision.
  • Types of inferences in the comprehension of metaphor

    Pistol, Ramona; ; Middlesex University (Academy Publication, 2018-08-20)
    This paper focuses on the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of metaphors. It builds on current studies in cognitive linguistics by proposing an amendment to the theoretical idea that there are two routes for comprehending metaphors. It presents an account which is underlined by concept adjustment in all types of metaphorical instances, with the only difference being in the degree of the inferences that it requires. In this paper I claim that a conscious level of processing is involved in the comprehension of some metaphors in order to determine the speaker’s meaning.
  • The politics of language and communication: revisiting the roots of feminist psychology

    Weatherall, Ann; Victoria University of Wellington (Sage, 2002-08-01)
  • Conversation analysis as feminist research: a response to Whelan

    Weatherall, Ann; Victoria University of Wellington (Taylor & Francis, 2012-08-28)
  • Pax Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia and America

    Bayard, Donn; Weatherall, Ann; Gallois, Cynthia; Pittam, Jeffery; University of Otago; Victoria University of Wellington; University of Queensland (Wiley, 2002-12-16)
    This study describes a series of evaluations of gender pairs of New Zealand English, Australian English, American English and RP-type English English voices by over 400 students in New Zealand, Australia and the U.S.A. Voices were chosen to represent the middle range of each accent, and balanced for paralinguistic features. Twenty-two personality and demographic traits were evaluated by Likert-scale questionnaires. Results indicated that the American female voice was rated most favourably on at least some traits by students of all three nationalities, followed by the American male. For most traits, Australian students generally ranked their own accents in third or fourth place, but New Zealanders put the female NZE voice in the mid-low range of all but solidarity-associated traits. All three groups disliked the NZE male. The RP voices did not receive the higher rankings in power/status variables we expected. The New Zealand evaluations downgrade their own accent vis-a`-vis the American and to some extent the RP voices. Overall, the American accent seems well on the way to equalling or even replacing RP as the prestige—or at least preferred—variety, not only in New Zealand but in Australia and some non-English-speaking nations as well. Preliminary analysis of data from Europe suggests this manifestation of linguistic hegemony as ‘Pax Americana’ seems to be prevalent over more than just the Anglophone nations.
  • Towards understanding gender and talk-in-interaction

    Weatherall, Ann; Victoria University of Wellington (Sage, 2002-11-01)
    Feminist language researchers typically assume that gender is relevant to any interaction. Conversation analysis offers an interesting challenge for feminists to show how and that the pervasiveness of gender is achieved in talk-in-interaction. The aim of this article is to make a step towards understanding the interactional mechanisms underling the omnirelevance of gender in daily life. The present study draws upon the practices and principles of conversation analysis, particularly the notions of repair and membership categorization devices, to examine recordings of children's interactions. Evidence that supports the claim that the organization of repair may be implicated in the (re)production of gender is presented.
  • Emotions in action: telephone-mediated dispute resolution

    Weatherall, Ann; Stubbe, Maria; Victoria University of Wellington; University of Otago (Wiley, 2014-09-24)
    The present study investigated emotions as they were made visible and responded to in a particular institutional setting. Following discursive psychology the aim was to provide a rigorous account of emotion as observable in talk-in-interaction. Using conversation analysis a focus was on the temporality of emotion in turns of talk and over the course of an interaction. Data were recordings and transcriptions of calls to a dispute resolution service for consumers' problems with electricity and gas. The analysis identified systematic practices callers' use for describing and doing upset. Call-takers rarely displayed emotion in the body of the calls and typically responded to institutionally relevant aspects of the callers' troubles and not the emotional ones. In the absence of any kind of endorsement of the callers' emotional stance, emotionality could escalate. Emotional affiliation regularly occurred at the end of the calls. The escalation of emotion in the absence of its endorsement and the occurrence of emotional affiliation at call-closing evidences a sequential property of emotion that has been largely overlooked.
  • Responding to Client Laughter as Therapeutic Actions in Practice

    Pomeroy, Lani; Weatherall, Ann; Victoria University of Wellington (Taylor & Francis, 2014-08-26)
    The widely presumed links between laughter and humour have raised questions about their roles in psychotherapeutic interactions. This study uses conversation analysis to explore client-initiated laughter and different kinds of responses to it. By examining sequences leading up to and following client laughter, we show two distinctive therapeutic actions that are accomplished. When particular lines of therapeutic questioning are being pursued, silence following client laughter functions to prompt further client talk. Client laughter can also build rapport by providing an opportunity for therapists to display that they also find something laughable. Both identified actions support important therapeutic work.
  • So Whose Words are they Anyway?

    Weatherall, Ann; Gavey, Nicola; Potts, Annie; Victoria University of Wellington; University of Auckland; University of Canterbury, New Zealand (Sage, 2002-11-01)
  • A feminist discourse analysis of popular-press accounts of postmaternity

    Sheriff, Michelle; Weatherall, Ann (SAGE, 2009-02-01)
    Feminist research has examined a broad range of women's experiences as mothers. However, relatively few studies exist on postmaternity, colloquially the `empty nest'. The present study is a feminist discourse analysis of the variable ways postmaternal experiences were described in popular-press accounts. The analysis identified individual differences as an ideological albeit commonsense notion for interpreting different responses to the departure of adult offspring. Two discourses of womanhood, `modern' and `traditional', produced an ideological dilemma where the subject position `fit adult' conflicted with that of `good mother'. `Adjustment' was used rhetorically to manage that dilemma. The analysis also considered the ways gender differences were managed and the significance of `empty nest' as a pervasive metaphorical colloquialism for postmaternity. The results show that longstanding cultural beliefs about women as mothers still exert a powerful discursive force. However, women can now be represented as having lives beyond the domestic sphere. A dilemma arising in accounts of contemporary women at postmaternity is the conflicting identities of socially fit, well-adjusted adults and good mothers who mourn the loss of their children.

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