Alignment to the Actions of a Robot

Alignment is a phenomenon observed in human conversation: Dialog partners’ behavior converges in many respects. Such alignment has been proposed to be automatic and the basis for communicating successfully. Recent research on human–computer dialog promotes a mediated communicative design account of alignment according to which the extent of alignment is influenced by interlocutors’ beliefs about each other. Our work aims at adding to these findings in two ways. (a) Our work investigates alignment of manual actions, instead of lexical choice. (b) Participants interact with the iCub humanoid robot, instead of an artificial computer dialog system. Our results confirm that alignment also takes place in the domain of actions. We were not able to replicate the results of the original study in general in this setting, but in accordance with its findings, participants with a high questionnaire score for emotional stability and participants who are familiar with robots align their actions more to a robot they believe to be basic than to one they believe to be advanced. Regarding alignment over the course of an interaction, the extent of alignment seems to remain constant, when participants believe the robot to be advanced, but it increases over time, when participants believe the robot to be a basic version

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

Networking expertise: Discursive coalitions and collaborative networks of experts in a public creationism controversy in the UK

Experts do play a particular role in public socio-scientific debates, even more so if they form heterogeneous coalition with other actors and experts. A case study about a public science education controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution/creationism in the UK press is used to investigate in detail how connections and coalitions between experts and other actors involved in the controversy emerged and played out. The research focuses on the question of what role collaborative and other networks of experts played in terms of influence, visibility, credibility, consensus and weight of argument. Issues that are considered in the research are the status of the members of the coalitions forming during the debate and how it is displayed in media representations and letters and petitions, and also how these networks and coalitions of experts perform in relation to each other

Autistic children's language imitation shows reduced sensitivity to ostracism

In dialogue, speakers tend to imitate, or align with, a partner’s language choices. Higher levels of alignment facilitate communication and can be elicited by affiliation goals. Since autistic children have interaction and communication impairments, we investigated whether a failure to display affiliative language imitation contributes to their conversational difficulties. We measured autistic children’s lexical alignment with a partner, following an ostracism manipulation which induces affiliative motivation in typical adults and children. While autistic children demonstrated lexical alignment, we observed no affiliative influence on ostracised children’s tendency to align, relative to controls. Our results suggest that increased language imitation—a potentially valuable form of social adaptation—is unavailable to autistic children, which may reflect their impaired affective understanding

Female Fertility Affects Men's Linguistic Choices

We examined the influence of female fertility on the likelihood of male participants aligning their choice of syntactic construction with those of female confederates. Men interacted with women throughout their menstrual cycle. On critical trials during the interaction, the confederate described a picture to the participant using particular syntactic constructions. Immediately thereafter, the participant described to the confederate a picture that could be described using either the same construction that was used by the confederate or an alternative form of the construction. Our data show that the likelihood of men choosing the same syntactic structure as the women was inversely related to the women's level of fertility: higher levels of fertility were associated with lower levels of linguistic matching. A follow-up study revealed that female participants do not show this same change in linguistic behavior as a function of changes in their conversation partner's fertility. We interpret these findings in the context of recent data suggesting that non-conforming behavior may be a means of men displaying their fitness as a mate to women

Atypical birdsong and artificial languages provide insights into how communication systems are shaped by learning, use and transmission

In this article, I argue that a comparative approach focusing on the cognitive capacities and behavioral mechanisms that underlie vocal learning in songbirds and humans can provide valuable insights into the evolutionary origins of language. The experimental approaches I discuss use abnormal song and atypical linguistic input to study the processes of individual learning, social interaction, and cultural transmission. Atypical input places increased learning and communicative pressure on learners, so exploring how they respond to this type of input provides a particularly clear picture of the biases and constraints at work during learning and use. Furthermore, simulating the cultural transmission of these unnatural communication systems in the laboratory informs us about how learning and social biases influence the structure of communication systems in the long run. Findings based on these methods suggest fundamental similarities in the basic social–cognitive mechanisms underlying vocal learning in birds and humans, and continuing research promises insights into the uniquely human mechanisms and into how human cognition and social behavior interact, and ultimately impact on the evolution of language