Helen Fraser

LINGUISTIC IDENTIFICATION IN THE DETERMINATION OF NATIONALITY: A PRELIMINARY REPORT

The authors of this report are five Australian experts in the fields of sociolinguistics, phonetics (analysis of accent or pronunciation)and language testing. Their report raises concerns about the “language analysis” that is being done by overseas agencies and that is being used by the Australian government in determining the nationality of refugee claimants, and concludes that “languageanalysis”, as it is currently used, is not valid or reliable. It appears to be based on “folk views” about the relationship between language and nationality and ethnicity, rather than sound linguistic principles. The report found that: i) a persons nationality cannot always be determined by the language he or she speaks, ii) a few key words and their pronunciation normally cannot reveal a persons nationality or ethnicity, iii) common perceptions about pronunciation differences among groups of people cannot be relied upon, iv) any analysis of pronunciation must be based on thorough knowledge of the language and region in question and must involve detailed phonetic analysis. Further more, in a study of 58 Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) decisions in which this “language analysis” was at issue, it was found that there were doubts over its validity. The authors have grave concerns that the use of “languageanalysis” in the determination of nationality may be preventing Australia from properly discharging its responsibilities under the Refugees Convention and therefore call on the Australian Government to stop using this type of analysis.

Communicating about Communication: Intercultural Competence as a Factor in the Success of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Many disciplines describe themselves as studying ‘communication’. However observation of interdisciplinary discussion suggests that ‘communication’ may be conceptualized in different ways by different disciplines. This paper aims to promote mutual understanding among disciplines, not by proposing a universally valid definition of communication to which all disciplines should subscribe, but by, first, offering a set of questions that can be used to help disciplinary groups communicate their own views on communication to colleagues from other disciplines, and then creating a (preliminary) typology to map out the range of possible positions that can be taken in relation to those questions. Noting that academic disciplines have distinct cultures, the paper presents some concepts of intercultural communication as understood in applied linguistics that may be useful in facilitating interdisciplinary communication about communication.

Towards a New Framework

The discussion of the last three chapters has been conducted on a fairly philosophical plane, as I have uncovered the understanding of Subject and World which supports cognitivist philosophy and thus the IP theory of human speech perception, and presented reasons to suggest that this understanding is not the most appropriate in the context. It remains then to relate this discussion to the specific domain of human speech perception research and theory; and it is the purpose of this final chapter to make that relationship. The chapter has two main aims. The first is to present a brief analysis of the IP model of speech perception in terms of the philosophical position outlined in Chapter 4. This will allow me to highlight what I see as ill-formulation of the questions IP seeks to answer, and to show how these and other problems with IP can be traced to certain incoherences in its basic assumptions about the nature of the Subject and the World. The second aim is to present a preliminary outline of an alternative framework within which available knowledge about human speech perception can be interpreted, and according to which further speech perception research might be conducted. This approach takes as its starting point a quite different understanding of the Subject and World to that of IP.

Review of Research on Human Speech Perception

In this first chapter, I provide an overview of the kind of research that has been done on speech perception in the Information-Processing (IP) framework, to be used as a basis for the discussion of the rest of the book. Later, I will give detailed comments in appraisal of the IP framework. In this review, however, I am concerned to provide a comprehensive and sympathetic description of human speech perception research as seen by IP; so the facts, questions and problems discussed here are facts, questions and problems within IP, rather than about IP.

Subject and World

In Chapter 2, I set out the central tenets and philosophical framework of cognitivism, the background philosophy within which the information-processing approach to human speech perception research is situated, and called attention to certain respects in which it could be considered to have an inappropriate understanding of the nature of the Subject of speech perception.