Coordination in dialog: Alignment of object naming in the Jigsaw Map Game

Weiß P, Pfeiffer T, Schaffranietz G, Rickheit G. Coordination in dialog: Alignment of object naming in the Jigsaw Map Game. In: Zimmer HD, Frings C, Mecklinger A, Opitz B, Pospeschill M, Wentura D, eds. Cognitive Science 2007: Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society of Germany. Saarbrücken; 2008.People engaged in successful dialog have to share knowledge, e.g., when naming objects, for coordinating their actions. According to Clark (1996), this shared knowledge, the common ground, is explicitly established, particularly by negotiations. Pickering and Garrod (2004) propose with their alignment approach a more automatic and resource-sensitive mechanism based on priming. Within the collaborative research center (CRC) "Alignment in Communication" a series of experimental investigations of natural Face-to-face dialogs should bring about vital evidence to arbitrate between the two positions. This series should ideally be based on a common setting. In this article we review experimental settings in this research line and refine a set of requirements. We then present a flexible design called the Jigsaw Map Game and demonstrate its applicability by reporting on a first experiment on object naming