Dennis Cokely has produced a lot of research in our field. His processing model is a big part of that, but we'll refer to his other work as well. I'm introducing more of his research on this page, so it's a long page with a lot of information. We'll be talking about Cokely's research often, this is just an introduction. This won't be your only exposure to it, it won't be your only chance to process this information.

1) Research on TYPES of errors or "MISCUES"

A miscue is a "lack of equivalence between the SL (source language) message and its interpretation or, more specifically, between the information in an interpretation and the information in the sL message it is supposed to convey." It is commonly thought to be synonymous with an "error", but it is not.

A miscue COULD be a decision that we make, or something we can't help because there just is no equivalence. We'll talk a lot more about these. I just wanted to introduce the terms now so they're associated with the rest of "Cokely day".

There are FIVE TYPES of MISCUES:

Omissions: Information did not make it into the interpretation

Morphological : tiny elements that change meaning. eg - left off PART of a meaning, signed "UNDERSTAND" when the meaning was "NOT-UNDERSTAND" (didn't shake your head no).

Lexical : word/phrase left completely out -- this is what we think of most often, missed words/signs.

Cohesive : not organizing message parts into contextual relationships -- what we're working with creating space "maps", keeping the discourse markers that help tie everything together.

Additions: Interpretation contains input of the interpreter

Non-manual: grammatically incorrect. -- Added facial expressions that distorted the meaning (those "OOPS" faces are a great example).

Lexical: word/phrase to contextualize or explain, but incorrect.

Cohesive: incorrectly organizing the message; making relationships where none exist.

Substitutions: Produced the wrong sign/word/concept, substituted something in place of another word or sign.

When we sign "FAMILY" but we meant to sign "IMPORTANT" - that's substitution.

Intrusions: Source language feature appeared in the interpretation - when we're too literal.

Lexical: Could be words/signs (GLOSSING) -- when our sign choices are too literal

Grammar: Syntax intrusion -- when our grammar is too close to the source language ("too English" when our goal is ASL)

Anomalies: Interpretation is inexplicably meaningless -- this is miscellaneous. All those other things that don't make sense.

Utterance: meaningless message

Interpretation: excessive or insufficient information

3) His model specifically mentions short-term message retention

Hopefully you see that everything we've talked about starts to come together when you read this. After Project 1 we're going to do more with Consecutive Interpreting (which will really involve chunking and short term memory).

"During the third stage, Short Term Message Retention, information is stored until sufficient portions of the source message are received. Information is "chunked" for storing then organized along with other chunked information. The interpreter uses appropriate "lag-time", waiting for idea completion and understanding. At this stage the interpreter must remember the elements of the source message s/he has determined to be important. This occurs while interpreting the message from just seconds before. The average interpreter tends to be a sentence and a half behind the speaker. The length of the “lag time” will be determined, in part, by the complexity of the message and the mode of communication required by the Deaf consumer, interpreting or transliteration. During this stage, the interpreter might remember the meaningful parts of the message which might differ slightly from the actual source language."

+ You must wait, use your lag/processing time to listen for the main ideas (Gish)

+ When you understand and use the information you can more easily hold the information in your short-term memory. You could still tell me the Junk Drawer story or the Vermont story. How do you remember that? It's been WEEKS! And with the "fun activity" you can see that people who were asked to THINK about the word were more likely to remember the words on the list. Those that were asked to just have information in, information out, struggled to remember the words.

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CHUNKING aids short term memory. If we're asked to remember this number 345908745 we might struggle. But if we chunk that information into our Social Security number - 345-90-8745 - it's easier. Research in memory and chunking is the reason our phone numbers and Social Secuirty numbers are formatted like they are. Our zip codes are 7 digits long because research said that our brains could easily retain 7 pieces of information.

This research was made famous by cognitive psychologist George Miller. In 1956, Miller found that most people can remember about 7 chunks of information in their short-term memory. What Miller found interesting, however, was not the number 7 itself. Instead, he was fascinated by the fact that the size of the chunks did not seem to matter — people could remember 7 individual letters, or 28 letters if they were grouped into 7 four-letter words. The main takeaway from Miller’s research should be this: if you want to retain more, pack information into meaningful chunks.

This is best understood with an example.

Give yourself five seconds to look at the letters below, then look away and try and remember as many of the 18 letters as you can

So rather than 18 separate pieces of information – 18 letters – you’ve reduced it down to just 3 concepts:

Animals, Companies, Alphabet

That’s much easier to remember! Can you try to memorize the words using the 3 categories and look away and recall them?

This is why we talked about the MIND MAPPING with the Vermont Story. One chunk of information may be, "Reasons why" or "Extreme place", then from there we'll remember more details within that chunk.

And DISCOURSE MARKERS help us identify chunks! So we're listening for a chunk of information based on cues in the language, we're grouping that information together, visualizing it (using the information) and if you're doing that -- MEMORY will just HAPPEN. You can't TRY to remember something. It's counterintuitive, it won't work. You have to relax your brain, use the information, and memory will happen.

"Role-Shifting" -- I wanted to take a moment to address the term we're using. Role-shifting is one of MANY terms that will be used to talk about taking on characters and showing us the action of the story. I want you to be aware of the other terms people use.

# Constructed Action / Constructed Dialogue -- Describes the process of "creating" action or dialogueby assuming a character.

# Depiction -- This is the term most often used by linguists or researchers to talk about the process of creating a picture, or "depicting" a scene or object. Depiction includes role-shifting and the use of classifiers.

# Describe Then Do -- from our Expansion Techniques - acting something out by doing.

What Marty Taylor says about role-shifting (she uses the terms Constructed Action and Dialouge):

{ Constructed Action, Constructed Dialogue, p. 174-180 }