Social Interaction and Communication

Social Interaction and Communication Across the Lifespan

Introduction

Heather Ferguson, a professor of cognitive psychology, discusses social interaction and communication.
Her research focuses on how conversations and social interactions change across the lifespan (adolescents, teenagers, young adults, midlife adults, and older adults).
She also examines how these interactions differ in conditions that specifically impact social interaction abilities, such as autism spectrum conditions.

Lecture Overview

Definitions: Semantics, pragmatics, and how their focus differs based on social, physical, and linguistic contexts.
Interactive Alignment: How interactive processes change the way we use and understand language.
Linguistic Theory: Presupposition, conversational implicatures, and the cooperation principle.
Social Motivational Factors: How in-group effects influence interaction and communication.
Linguistic Features: Counterfactual language and figurative language (metaphors, sarcasm, irony).

Semantics vs. Pragmatics

Semantics

Conceptual meaning of words.
Dictionary definition of a word.
Relationship with other words within a conceptual domain.
Formal structure of a word and its meaning in a sentence.

Pragmatics

How language means something different in different contexts or to different people.
Interactive nature of communication.
Alignment and coordination between speakers.
Influence of context (who is speaking, who they're speaking with, how much information everyone holds) and intentions (deception, humor).
Same semantic content can have different pragmatic meanings.

Example: The Word "Coffee"

Semantic meaning: dark colored drink, typically drunk warm, made from beans, a morning beverage.
Semantic relationships: "coffee and cake", "coffee and breakfast", "black coffee", "mocha", "espresso".
Pragmatic meaning: Used to describe skin color or voice quality; euphemism for sex in comedy.

Pragmatic Context

Understanding homonyms (e.g., "bank" as a financial institution or the side of a riverbed).
Interpreting intentions behind statements (e.g., "Is he really that kind?").
Understanding implied meanings (e.g., "You should see her house").
Interpreting common phrases (e.g., "babies and toddlers sale").

Dynamic Context and Meaning

Meaning changes based on contextual cues (place, people, intentions).
Language context: Using linguistic cues to disambiguate meaning (e.g., "savings at the bank").
Physical context: Using physical cues to influence meaning (e.g., a sign for "bank" on a building).
Social context: Influence of speaker and comprehender characteristics on intended and understood meaning.
Who is speaking, who are they speaking to, why are they having this conversation, and when is it taking place?
Where does it take place? Can other people overhear? Are you at work, in a formal setting, or are you among friends at the pub?
What's already known to the speaker and listener and the others in the conversation?

Sarcasm Example

Speaker provides cues to indicate sarcasm (facial expressions, tone of voice, posture).
These cues help interpret the correct meaning, often intended as humor.

Trustworthiness

Speakers with non-native accents are often judged as less truthful compared to native speakers.
Understanding is facilitated by the combination of all cues (gestures, facial expressions, tone, language).

Experimental Evidence: Cognitive Neuroscience

Studies using the N400 effect (recorded using ERPs) to measure brain activity in response to semantic anomalies.
N400 effect: Negative wave that peaks around 400 milliseconds after the onset of a critical word, indicating detection of a semantic anomaly.

Sentence-Level Anomaly

Hearing "the peanut was in love" elicits a large N400 effect because it doesn't make sense.

Contextual Influence

Providing an appropriate context can completely flip the N400 effect.
If the peanut is presented as an animated character, "the peanut was salty" elicits an N400 effect instead.

Speaker Characteristics

Male or female voice saying something like "If only I looked like Britney Spears in her latest video."
Speakers with different accents.
Adults and children talking about having a glass of wine or milk before going to bed.

Error Detection

Listeners showed a strong NREF effect (detection of grammatical errors) when listening to a native speaker making grammatical errors.
Listeners were more accommodating of foreign-accented speakers making grammatical mistakes and did not show the same error detection response.
Listeners detected semantic anomalies in both native and non-native speaker accents.

Examples for Pragmatic Meaning

"What an amazing baseball player John is" can be sarcastic if John played poorly.
"The mouse ran across the road and threw the dynamite" makes sense in the context of Tom and Jerry.
"Pick up the red star" is over-informative if there is only one star.
"I've always worked hard to be fair and transparent" shows an error if there is some history of that person not being like that.

Interactive Alignment

Core Concepts

Pragmatics: Study of invisible meanings that are inferred but not explicitly agreed upon.
Shared understanding is crucial for successful communication.
Miscommunication can easily cause offense if intention is not known.

Examples

"I thought she really liked your book" vs. "Yeah, you thought she did."
"The man downstairs quite likes his music" implies a complaint about noisy music.

Interactive Alignment Theory

Criticism of language theories that assume language isolation.
Humans are designed for communication and engage in dialogues rather than monologues.
Goal of conversation: to communicate information effectively.
Pickering and Garrett propose that language and comprehension are equally important. In their interactive model, every person has their own situation model that aligns through the conversation.

Situation Model

Mental representation of what's happening in a conversation.
Includes what you know, who you're talking with, context, intentions, goals, and history of conversations.
Through conversation, these situation models align and change the way people use language.

Key Assumptions of Interactive Alignment Model

Alignment occurs automatically without explicit discussion.
Comprehenders and producers are equally important in ensuring understanding.
Interaction cascades across different levels, from word choices to the entire situation model.
Inferences about mental states happen spontaneously without direct taking.

Prediction

Speakers need to think about what they're going to say next and monitor their own behaviors.
Listeners need to predict what the other person is going to say and use a forward model.
Involves social cognitive ability and theory of mind.

Maze Game Experiment

Two participants had to work cooperatively to move through a maze.
Participants quickly aligned on unambiguous description schemes.
These schemes developed quickly over different trials without explicit agreement.
Corrections and negative feedback were useful for repairing and changing communication.

Levels of Alignment

Language choices: People tend to use the same words as the other person.
Gestures: People align in the sorts of gestures they use.
Phonology: How people replicate pronunciation.
Figurative language: If one speaker uses non-literal language, the other speaker increases their use as well.
Syntax: mirroring word order.

Conceptual Pact Theory

Aligned meanings and expressions are specific to the individual you've had the conversation with.
People are sensitive to what they know about the other person and their shared mutual understanding.
Breaking a conceptual pact disrupts relationships and causes communication breakdowns.

Social Context

Speakers are sensitive to the social context in which they have conversations.
Even with a conceptual pact, they use more words when there is a third person present to help the listener understand.
Studies show this is true up to seven people in a conversation.

Physical Environment

People are also sensitive to cues from their physical environment.
Physical cues can provide context to limit the sort of interpretation and need to distinguish between different types of objects.

Consequences of Interactive Alignment

The more the other person uses the same words as the participants, the participant thinks that the person is more accurate. Alignment increases confidence in the other person.
Participants found the task easier to perform when there was alignment. They found the flow of conversation much easier.
These only worked for the human that was working with the speaker. The computer did not affect the thoughts of the participant.

Neural Activity

Neural synchrony can support understanding, joint attention, and empathization.

When people are having clear communication, their brain activity aligns..

Neural synchronization between brains has be shown to make communication much more successful..

Brain activity starts to align between speaker and listener in successful conversations.
Neural synchrony increases with successful communication.

Methods for Measuring Neural Activity

EEG (Electroencephalography): Measures electrical brain activity but is disrupted by movement.
fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging): Measures spatial locations of brain activity but limits movement and natural conversation.
fNIRS (Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy): Uses infrared light to measure brain activity with good temporal and spatial information and allows movement.

Brain Activity in Interactive Tasks

Individuals completing tasks alone show brain activity in different areas and time courses.
Participants having a conversation show alignment in structural and temporal activity with neural synchrony.
Even those exposed to the social interactive setting show a degree of alignment.

Presupposition and Conversational Implicatures

Presupposition

Implied shared understanding of something.
Inference related to an expression used in a particular context.
Assumes the other person already knows something or that something is already true.
Example: "Did you eat the cheese?" assumes that both people know there was cheese there.

Conversational Implicatures

Inference of additional meaning on top of what is said.
Distinction between conventional and conversational implicatures.
Conventional implicatures: Always convey the same meaning regardless of context (e.g., "however" means a counterpoint is coming).
Conversational implicatures: Meaning differs depending on context.
Example: Responding "The laptop is in the kitchen" to the question "Can I check my email?" implies yes.
Implicatures are cancellable: can be changed as the conversation goes on.

Cooperation Principle

Theory about how communicators convey meaning in conversation.
Based on work by Grice, philosophy of language.
Regularity in language production and inferences.
Systematic accounting for how language can become abstract quickly in conversation.
Tacit agreement between speakers and listeners to be cooperative for efficient communication.
Not a fixed set of rules but an adaptive process.
Rules can be broken to infer a different meaning.

Maxims of Conversation

Four types of inferences that help conversation flow more easily:
- Quality
- Quantity
- Relevance
- Manner

Maxim of Quality

Give only information that is true and have evidence of.
Example: If someone asks, "Who won the match yesterday?" the answer should be true and known.

Maxim of Quantity

Give the right amount of information for the intended purpose.
Be as informative as required but not more informative than necessary.
Example: Saying "There's a petrol station around the corner" assumes it's open and has patrol.

Maxim of Relevance

Make your answer relevant to the question or topic being discussed.
Example: If someone says, "Can I borrow €10?" and the answer is "My wallet is in the bedroom," the implicature is that the person can get it.

Maxim of Manner

Be informative and not deliberately confusing.
Describe things in the order they happened and use unambiguous words.
Example: If someone says, "Do you love me?" and the answer is "Of course I do," the unambiguous answer is yes.

Violating Maxims

When people violate maxims they mean to communicate something else..

If a speaker deliberately flouts maxims, it makes the hearer think about what else they are really meaning.
Conversation implicatures are derived on the basis of breaking these maxims.
Examples:
- Breaking quality: Sarcasm
- Breaking quantity: Missing information implies something.
- Breaking relevance: Not answering a question directly implies something.
- Breaking manner: Skirting around a question implies a negative answer.

Canceling Implicature

Implicatures can be canceled by saying the intention was different.
Example: Letter to newspaper suggesting Margaret Thatcher should hold on until the summer implies her resignation would cause street parties, but that could be denied.

Social Motivation and Group Effects

Communication Requires Alignment

There are two types of people having conversations..

Motivation, it may cause successful communication.

Conversation requires alignment between people and involves the wider social context.
The motivation to engage in a conversation causes great communication.
Motivation to be involved in the conversation influences communication and the effort put in.
People might have different intentions and desires for success in communication.

Social Distancing

As people get older, they are more likely to socially distance and donate to local charities, indicating increased prosocial behaviors.
Older adults show increased willingness to donate to local charities but decreased willingness to donate to international charities.

Socioemotional Selectivity Theory

In older age, people become more motivated to focus on higher quality social interactions.
Reserving cognitive abilities for conversations..

Double Empathy Problem

Matching neurotypes enhances communication.

Communication difficulties arise when two different kinds of people try to have a conversation.
Aligned situation models, ways of thinking, and representations make conversation easier.
Neurotype mismatch between pairs breaks down communication.
This works for education and more.*
Neural oscillation helps.

Autism Spectrum Conditions

Studies examine the extent to which neurotype match or mismatch between pairs influences the success of a conversation and rapport.
Matching social interaction contexts and communicative styles enhances conversation success.
Match pairs of the same type, or a non-autistic pair..
Autistic and Non-autistic pairs were measured.

Diffusion Chain Transfusion of Information

Communication was more effective in neurotype matched settings.
Non-autistic had better success over time.
Mix chains reported lower rapport compared to matched types.
Grouped had better communications and relations.

Neural Alignment

Brain to brain synchrony leads to improve after time.

Group learning with improved memory has brain activity..

Learning in a group is more effective than learning as individuals, there is synchrony as well.

Language and the Conflict Between Semantics and Pragmatics

Counterfactuals

The actual conflict is the Semantics.
We make the representation as an alternative version.

Hypothetical situations describe a valid reasoning that arises in a true hypothetical model but is actually false.
Involve representation of true and false information.
Examples: "I wish I'd won the lottery" implies the speaker did not win.
Learning self is better.

Most studies look at ERP and FMR research*.

Rapid access to what described the word is, it depends on the version.*
Counterfactual thinking, is really important for those processes and that there is brain overlap.

Figurative Language

motivated reasoning*
The most difficult is literal thinking.

Key Ideas

Sarcasm, metaphor, irony, which imply something different from what is said.
Figurative language is softened by doing so.
Conflict and semantics. There is a direct conflict between the semantics and its Pragmatics.

Hypotheses

*Efficiency and effort *.

Early theories suggested that all figurative language is inherently difficult.
More recent theories suggest that some figurative language is easy to understand.Highly Familiar for you is easy.

Familiar language is a graded form of the salience hypothesis. The Context constraints is what makes them make it..

Conclusion

Salient literal and not with the time frame of salience.*.
*You can have questions if you would like*.