Like Mother, Like Daughter

My motivation for this piece was to shed light on what it is like growing up with a heritage, knowing it from your experience and family, and yet, having people challenge you your whole life to prove it. No one questions my German, Irish, or Finnish ethnicity, but, since I don’t match the stereotype of a Native American, I am constantly challenged.The image on my painting depicts my twin sister, Indigo, the only one of us five kids to have blonde hair and blue eyes, from my mother’s mother and my father’s mother and father. Having a mother who was not my skin color, raised questions.This is an inevitable part of the multiracial (and also adoption, though this was not my case) experience. I have noticed over the years that even other natives can be prejudiced when it comes to native-only spaces, like pow wows, where there are competitions of different styles of dance. Picking the winner sometimes rests on who looks the best to represent the part, not necessarily based on dance skill

Referential Communication Between Friends and Strangers in the Wild

The Map Task (Anderson et al., 1991) and Tangram Task (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) are traditional referential communication tasks that are used in psycholinguistics research to demonstrate how conversational partners mutually agree on descriptions (or referring expressions) for landmarks or unusual target objects. These highly-controlled, laboratory-based tasks take place under conditions that are relatively unusual for naturally-occurring conversations (Speed, Wnuk, & Majid, 2016). In this study, we used the Artwalk Task (Liu, Fox Tree, & Walker, 2016) – a real world-situated blend of the Map Task and Tangram Task – to demonstrate that the process of negotiating referring expressions ‘in the wild’ is similar to the process that takes place in a laboratory. In Artwalk, participant pairs communicated via a Skype-to-mobile phone connection. One participant guided the other through a small downtown area with the goal of identifying public art objects, finding objects twice during two rounds. In addition to replicating laboratory results, we also found that acquaintanceship and extraversion influenced the number of unique descriptors used by dyads in this task. In Round 1, introverts in stranger dyads used fewer descriptors but introverts in friend dyads were indistinguishable from extraverts. The influence of extraversion declined by Round 2. This study suggests that referent negotiation observed in labs is generalizable but that naturalistic communication is subject to social and personality factors that may not be as influential in laboratory conditions

Disfluency in dialogue:an intentional signal from the speaker?

Disfluency is a characteristic feature of spontaneous human speech, commonly seen as a consequence of problems with production. However, the question remains open as to why speakers are disfluent: Is it a mechanical by-product of planning difficulty, or do speakers use disfluency in dialogue to manage listeners' expectations? To address this question, we present two experiments investigating the production of disfluency in monologue and dialogue situations. Dialogue affected the linguistic choices made by participants, who aligned on referring expressions by choosing less frequent names for ambiguous images where those names had previously been mentioned. However, participants were no more disfluent in dialogue than in monologue situations, and the distribution of types of disfluency used remained constant. Our evidence rules out at least a straightforward interpretation of the view that disfluencies are an intentional signal in dialogue. © 2012 Psychonomic Society, Inc

Why Um Helps Auditory Word Recognition: The Temporal Delay Hypothesis

Several studies suggest that speech understanding can sometimes benefit from the presence of filled pauses (uh, um, and the like), and that words following such filled pauses are recognised more quickly. Three experiments examined whether this is because filled pauses serve to delay the onset of upcoming words and these delays facilitate auditory word recognition, or whether the fillers themselves serve to signal upcoming delays in a way which informs listeners' reactions. Participants viewed pairs of images on a computer screen, and followed recorded instructions to press buttons corresponding to either an easy (unmanipulated, with a high-frequency name) or a difficult (visually blurred, low-frequency) image. In all three experiments, participants were faster to respond to easy images. In 50% of trials in each experiment, the name of the image was directly preceded by a delay; in the remaining trials an equivalent delay was included earlier in the instruction. Participants were quicker to respond when a name was directly preceded by a delay, regardless of whether this delay was filled with a spoken um, was silent, or contained an artificial tone. This effect did not interact with the effect of image difficulty, nor did it change over the course of each experiment. Taken together, our consistent finding that delays of any kind help word recognition indicates that natural delays such as fillers need not be seen as ‘signals’ to explain the benefits they have to listeners' ability to recognise and respond to the words which follow them

An investigation of the determinants of dialogue navigation in joint activities

When people engage in joint activities together, they use dialogue – and more specifically project markers such as yeah, okay or uh-huh – to coordinate entrances and exits of projects and subprojects. The purpose of the current study was to examine how two features of the dialogue situation, namely mental load and face visibility, affect project marker production. Pairs of participants performed a collaborative puzzle game together. Mental load was manipulated through time pressure; visibility was manipulated by allowing the participants to see each other’s face during the task, or not. Dialogues were transcribed and coded for project marker production. Project marker production was found to increase under mental load; this also depended on the role of the speaker in the dyad (Director or Matcher) and on face visibility. This sheds light on the idea that dialogue partners may behave more collaboratively when experiencing high levels of mental load, contributing to a better understanding of mental resource allocation in dialogue-based joint activities