Dialogue

Why is dialogue difficult to study?

common ground, audience design, interactive-alignment model, real time adaptation between speakers,

Early research in dialogue

• speech accomidation theory: how speech characteristics used influence how people perceive us

• we match tone and gesure

• response matching: we match our conversational partners on a range of factors

Common ground

the shared knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions between speakers

Two types of common ground

1. personal common ground based on shared experiences

2. Communal common ground based on group membership

   1. more impersonal (like liking the same football team)

Bilinguals will switch languages based on what they assume their partner knows

Referential communication task

• 2 people discribing abstract shapes to each other

  • at first descriptions are long and detailed

  • over time they develop shorter, shared labels

Lexical entrainment

the evolution of discriptions from long and detained to short and shared after speaking for a long time

Maze game Garrod and Anderson

2 participants using descriptions to get through a maze

example of lexical entrainment

partners tended to converge on description scemes

• adopted similar forms of discription

was not the result of specific negotiation

principle of output/input co-ordination

formulating your output according to the same principles of interpretation as the most recent input

Maze task with Garrod and Doherty (1994)

3 different relationships between speakers

• changing partners frequently but drawn from the same group of people

• changed partners regularly but were not from the same group of people

• repeatedly with the same person

Strongest was changing partners but in the same community

demonstrates power of communal common ground

Audience design

how the speakers adjust their language based on their listeners needs, knowledge, and background

Audience design Issacs and Clark 1987

• speakers described pictures of New York landmarks to either out of towners or new yorkers

• they modified their descriptions accordingly

Audience design Ferreira et al 2005

tested linguistic vs non-linguistic ambiguity

• the images with the bats (small large) and bats (animal vs baseball)

participants were better at avoiding non-linguistic than linguistic ambiguity

Limits of audience design

• Keysar and Henley (2002)

  • speakers overestimate at how good they are at conveying information

Interactive-alignment model of dialogue

suggests that conversation is smooth because people unconsiously match their partners language at multiple levels

• lexical, syntactic, phonetic, conceptual

Syntactic priming

speakers reused words and grammatical structures from their partner’s sentences-even when alternatives were available

bilingual alignment

bilinguals were more likely to use a structure in L2 if they had just heard it in L1

if a bilingual speaker code-switched, their partner was more likely to code switch as well

Alignment in signed languages

signers accomodate regional variation

signers adjust signing space based on their parter

ASL signers align their syntactic choices

advantages and disadvantages of the interactive alignment model

• advantages

  • explains the efficiency of dialogue

  • supported by much evidence

  • links language processing to social interaction

• disadvantages

  • difficult to falsify

  • limited explaination for individual differences

  • ignores conscious higher-level planning and contextual choices