Lexical alignment in triadic communication

Foltz A, Gaspers J, Thiele K, Stenneken P, Cimiano P. Lexical alignment in triadic communication. Frontiers in Psychology. 2015;6: 127

Lexical alignment in triadic communication

Lexical alignment refers to the adoption of one's interlocutor's lexical items. Accounts of the mechanisms underlying such lexical alignment differ (among other aspects) in the role assigned to addressee-centered behavior. In this study, we used a triadic communicative situation to test which factors may modulate the extent to which participants' lexical alignment reflects addressee-centered behavior. Pairs of naive participants played a picture matching game and received information about the order in which pictures were to be matched from a voice over headphones. On critical trials, participants did or did not hear a name for the picture to be matched next over headphones. Importantly, when the voice over headphones provided a name, it did not match the name that the interlocutor had previously used to describe the object. Participants overwhelmingly used the word that the voice over headphones provided.This result points to non-addressee-centered behavior and is discussed in terms of disrupting alignment with the interlocutor as well as in terms of establishing alignment with the voice over headphones. In addition, the type of picture (line drawing vs. tangram shape) independently modulated lexical alignment, such that participants showed more lexical alignment to their interlocutor for (more ambiguous) tangram shapes compared to line drawings. Overall, the results point to a rather large role for non-addressee-centered behavior during lexical alignment

Emergence and adaptation of referential conventions in dialogue

When speakers in dialogue are faced with the need to repeatedly refer to the same items, they usually use the same references they or their partners had used before. These previously-used references act as precedents, standing in speakers’ memory as successful ways of solving that particular communicative need. From mechanistic models explaining this reuse as a consequence of low-level priming (Pickering & Garrod, 2004), to models assuming sophisticated partner-modelling processes (Clark & Marshall, 1981; Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986), most theories assume speakers will maintain their referential choices throughout the dialogue. While references might be modified to discard superfluous elements (as in referential reduction, Krauss & Weinheimer, 1964; or simplification, Bard & Aylett, 2005), conceptualisations will be preserved. However, there are several reasons why speakers might need to change their previous referential choices: a context change might render the old reference insufficient to identify the target, or overly detailed, prompting the listener to wonder if additional meanings are implied. It might also be that the repetition of the task highlights a better referential alternative, or that additional information makes other alternatives more salient for the speakers. In this thesis, I present an investigation of the dynamics of reference repetition and change in dialogue, bringing together a theoretical analysis of the existing literature and 5 experiments that aim to clarify how, when, and why speakers might change their referential choices. Experiment 1 explores the dynamics of reference change when the repetition of a task creates additional pressures that were not evident in an initial exposure. The experiment compares pairs and individual speakers describing positions in two spatial contexts (regular or irregular mazes, as in Garrod & Anderson, 1987; Garrod & Doherty, 1994) that cue participants into using different referential descriptions. As the task is repeated over 3 rounds, an additional pressure for efficiency is created, pushing participants across contexts into using one of the two initial descriptive choices. Crucially, only interacting pairs of participants adapted to this additional pressure by switching to a more efficient alternative, while participants completing the task individually maintained their initial choices. Additionally, this chapter reports a pilot study of the same experiment in 4-person groups that showed a switching pattern similar to the one found in interacting pairs. Experiments 2 and 3 further investigate the drivers of linguistic change in referential choice and the relationship between interaction and adaptation found on experiment 1. Experiment 2 explores the relationship between context change and linguistic change. Using the maze game paradigm, the experiment presented individuals and pairs of participants with either the same maze in each round of the task, or different mazes in the first and the second halves of the experiment. The results of Experiment 2 offer some support to the conclusions of Experiment 1, as participants switched to Abstract descriptions as they gained experience in the task; however there were no significant differences between Interaction conditions, nor between Same or Different mazes. Experiment 3 was aimed at exploring which features of interaction were relevant for reference change. The experiment used the maze game in different interactive setups, in which participants played a first round of the game either as Matchers (in direct interaction with the Director) or Overhearers (having access to another pair’s dialogue), and three successive rounds as Directors with either the same partner as in the first round, or a new partner. Participants showed higher levels of adaptation as they gained experience in the task; while the different interactive setups did not significantly influence their reference choices. Experiments 4 and 5 further explore the relationship between reference change and participant role in interaction. Using a picture matching paradigm (Brennan & Clark, 1996), Experiment 4 tested participants interacting with either the Same Partner throughout, a New Partner in the second half of the experiment, or an Overhearer (who had witnessed the first half of the experiment) in the second half. Participants in all conditions maintained previously used overspecific picture descriptions even when those detailed descriptions were not needed to identify the referents, pointing towards a predominance of speaker-centred factors in reference choice. Experiment 5 used a similar interactive setup, testing participants on a larger set of pictures. Participants maintained their overspecific descriptions only if interacting with the Same Partner they had on the first half of the experiment, or with the Overhearer, switching to context-appropriate basic-level descriptions if interacting with a New Partner. Taken together, both experiments suggest a complex balance between speaker-centred and audience-design factors in the potential change of reference choices, where speakers need to weigh their own effort against the communicative needs of their partner. These experiments highlight the crucial role of interaction in the adaptation of reference choices to changes in context, and show that individuals’ ‘conservative bias’ that leads them to maintain their own previously used references can be overturned in the search for better communicative alternatives in interactive dialogue

Uncommon ground: the distribution of dialogue contexts

PhDContext in dialogue is at once regarded as a set of resources enabling successful interpretation and is altered by such interpretations. A key problem for models of dialogue, then, is to specify how the shared context evolves. However, these models have been developed mainly to account for the way context is built up through direct interaction between pairs of participants. In multi-party dialogue, patterns of direct interaction between participants are often more unevenly distributed. This thesis explores the effects of this characteristic on the development of shared contexts. A corpus analysis of ellipsis shows that side-participants can reach the same level of grounding as speaker and addressee. Such dialogues result in collective contexts that are not reducible to their component dyadic interactions. It is proposed that this is characteristic of dialogues in which a subgroup of the participants are organised into a party, who act as a unified aggregate to carry the conversation forward. Accordingly, the contextual increments arising from a dialogue move from one party member can affect the party as a whole. Grounding, like turn-taking, can therefore operate between parties rather than individuals. An experimental test of this idea is presented which provides evidence for the practical reality of parties. Two further experiments explore the impact of party membership on the accessibility of context. The results indicate that participants who, for a stretch of talk, fall inside and outside of the interacting parties, effect divergent contextual increments. This is evidence for the emergence of distinct dialogue contexts in the same conversation. Finally, it is argued that these findings present significant challenges for how formal models of dialogue deal with individual contributions. In particular, they point to the need for such models to index the resulting contextual increments to specific subsets of the participant

Speech production, dual-process theory, and the attentive addressee

This thesis outlines a model of Speaker-Addressee interaction that suggests some answers to two linked problems current in speech production. The first concerns an under-researched issue in psycholinguistics: how are decisions about speech content – conceptualization – carried out? The second, a pragmatics problem, asks how Speakers, working under the heavy time pressures of normal dialogue, achieve optimal relevance often enough for successful communication to take place. Links between these problems are discussed in Chapter 1; Chapter 2 reviews existing research on speech production and dialogue. Chapter 3 presents the central claim of my thesis: that the Addressee exerts a significant influence over the Speaker’s decision-making at a level below the latter’s consciousness. Using evidence drawn from psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and human-computer interaction, Chapter 4 presents evidence to support this claim, demonstrating that a Speaker’s performance can be decisively affected at a preconscious level by the degree of attentiveness shown by the Addressee. Lack of attentiveness, in particular, appears to damage speech production at the conceptualization level. I suggest, therefore, that Speaker and Addressee are linked in a feedback loop: unless a Speaker achieves and maintains relevance to an Addressee, the Addressee’s interest will be lost, and this will impair the Speaker’s production abilities and hence the communication process itself. Chapters 5 and 6 consider some automatic mechanisms that may help Speakers dovetail their productions to Addressee need. These include the neural mechanisms underlying face perception and social rejection; automatic aspects of theory of mind; intuitive memory and inference systems of the type being explored in dual-process theory; and connections between verbal performance and behavioural priming currently being investigated. Chapter 7 summarizes the complete argument, discusses its wider implications, and includes suggestions for further work

Gender differences in navigation dialogues with computer systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Gender is among the most influential of the factors underlying differences in spatial abilities, human communication and interactions with and through computers. Past research has offered important insights into gender differences in navigation and language use. Yet, given the multidimensionality of these domains, many issues remain contentious while others unexplored. Moreover, having been derived from non-interactive, and often artificial, studies, the generalisability of this research to interactive contexts of use, particularly in the practical domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), may be problematic. At the same time, little is known about how gender strategies, behaviours and preferences interact with the features of technology in various domains of HCI, including collaborative systems and systems with natural language interfaces. Targeting these knowledge gaps, the thesis aims to address the central question of how gender differences emerge and operate in spatial navigation dialogues with computer systems. To this end, an empirical study is undertaken, in which, mixed-gender and same-gender pairs communicate to complete an urban navigation task, with one of the participants being under the impression that he/she interacts with a robot. Performance and dialogue data were collected using a custom system that supported synchronous navigation and communication between the user and the robot. Based on this empirical data, the thesis describes the key role of the interaction of gender in navigation performance and communication processes, which outweighed the effect of individual gender, moderating gender differences and reversing predicted patterns of performance and language use. This thesis has produced several contributions; theoretical, methodological and practical. From a theoretical perspective, it offers novel findings in gender differences in navigation and communication. The methodological contribution concerns the successful application of dialogue as a naturalistic, and yet experimentally sound, research paradigm to study gender and spatial language. The practical contributions include concrete design guidelines for natural language systems and implications for the development of gender-neutral interfaces in specific domains of HCI

Role of language in conceptual coordination

Although concepts are located within individual minds, while word forms are shared across entire language communities, words and concepts are normally deemed to be tightly bound. But in fact, at least to the extent that concepts vary, the relationship between words and concepts may not be as uniform or stable as is often assumed. Nevertheless, language may itself mediate that relationship, through its entrenchment and use. Psychologists have already investigated language use in referential communication, but they have yet to focus in detail on the role of language in conceptual coordination. One of the obstacles has been the theoretical and methodological challenges that arise from seriously abandoning conceptual universals. To that end, an experimental framework was developed based on sorting tasks in which participants freely partition a set of stimuli into categories and an objective measure for comparing two outputs. Four experiments were then conducted to investigate whether people were conceptually coordinated before, during and after linguistic interaction. Experiment 1 consisted of a cross-linguistic study looking at default coordination between native speakers. Participants both sorted items into groups and named them individually. There was a relatively high degree of categorisation agreement among speakers of the same language, but not nearly as high as for naming agreement. Experiments 2-4 inquired into conceptual coordination during or immediately after linguistic interaction. Experimental manipulations involved the form of language use (full dialogue or only category labels), as well as the type of feedback (category groupings, labels, both, or neither). In particular, Experiment 2 investigated the effects of categorising a set of objects together, with or without dialogue, on subsequent individual categorisation. The results were inconclusive and revealed specific methodological issues, but yielded interesting data and were encouraging for the general framework. Experiment 3 modified the designwhile testing and extending the same general hypotheses. Participants carried out a sequence of categorisation tasks in which they tried to coordinate their categories, followed by individual categorisation and similarity tasks. The availability of dialogue and feedback was manipulated in the interactive tasks. During interaction, they also received both kinds of feedback, except in the control condition. Pairs that could talk coordinated much better than the others, but feedback didn’t help. Experiment 4 looked into the effects of the four possibilities for feedback during a longer sequence of interactive tasks. In general, conceptual coordination was found to depend on grouping feedback only. However, by the end of the task, pairs who received both kinds of feedback did best. All three interactive experiments also measured lexical convergence between pairs. The results generally revealed a dissociation, with lexical alignment showingmore convergence and occurring under a wider variety of conditions. Togetherwith previous research, these findings showthat language can bring about conceptual coordination. However, it appears that the richer the form of language use, the more conceptual convergence occurs, and the closer it gets coupled with lexical convergence. The long-term effects, if any, are much weaker. These studies have implications for the general role of language in cognition and other important issues

Priming and conceptual pacts in overhearers’ adoption of referring expressions

Behnel M, Cummins C, Sichelschmidt L, de Ruiter J. Priming and conceptual pacts in overhearers’ adoption of referring expressions. In: Knauff M, Pauen M, Sebanz N, Wachsmuth I, eds. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society; 2013: 1869-1874