Intelligibility of speech addressed to children

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Adapting referring expressions to the task environment

When people refer to objects linguistically, they must choose properties of the object that make it possible for the listener to identify the intended referent. We show that this selection of properties not only depends on the task environment but also changes over the course of time. We find that the salient feature color is used less often over time because of its limited utility in our task, while other features with high utility are used more often. We also find that the speaker does not change his/her behavior because of feedback from the interlocutor but because of experience gained when the roles in the task are reversed

Tuning accessibility of referring expressions in situated dialogue

Accessibility theory associates more complex referring expressions with less accessible referents. Felicitous referring expressions should reflect accessibility from the addressee's perspective, which may be difficult for speakers to assess incrementally. If mechanisms shared by perception and production help interlocutors align internal representations, then dyads with different roles and different things to say should profit less from alignment. We examined introductory mentions of on-screen shapes within a joint task for effects of access to the addressee's attention, of players’ actions and of speakers’ roles. Only speakers’ actions affected the form of referring expression and only different role dyads made egocentric use of actions hidden from listeners. Analysis of players’ gaze around referring expressions confirmed this pattern; only same role dyads coordinated attention as the accessibility theory predicts. The results are discussed within a model distributing collaborative effort under the constraints of joint tasks

Towards a psycholinguistics of dialogue: defining reaction time and error rate in a dialogue corpus.

This study uses the multi-level coding of a designed corpus of unscripted task-oriented dialogues to demonstrate that time to respond (Inter-Move Interval, IMI) and rate of disfluency behave like psycholinguistic measures, reaction time and error rate, in reflecting the speakers' cognitive burdens. Multiple-regression analyses show that IMI is sensitive to social distance between interlocutors, to the difficulty of the task which the dialogue serves, and to comprehension of the prior utterance and production of the current one. Rate of simple overt disfluency, in contrast, shows social and task effects, with most of the uniquely explained variance associated with planning and producing the current utterance. The results suggest that coded corpora may be useful in developing models of human interlocutors.caslpub2260pu

Aix Map Task corpus:The French multimodal corpus of task-oriented dialogue

International audienceThis paper introduces the Aix Map Task corpus, a corpus of audio and video recordings of task-oriented dialogues. It was modelled afterthe original HCRC Map Task corpus. Lexical material was designed for the analysis of speech and prosody, as described in (Astésanoet al., 2007). The design of the lexical material, the protocol and some basic quantitative features of the existing corpus are presented.The corpus was collected under two communicative conditions, one audio-only condition and one face-to-face condition. The recordingstook place in a studio and a sound attenuated booth respectively, with head-set microphones (and in the face-to-face condition with twovideo cameras). The recordings have been segmented into Inter-Pausal-Units and transcribed using transcription conventions containingactual productions and canonical forms of what was said. It is made publicly available online

Prosodic marking of contrasts in information structure

Successful dialogue requires cultivation of com-mon ground (Clark, 1996), shared information, which changes as the conversation proceeds. Dialogue partners can maintain common ground by using different modalities like eye gaze, facial expressions, gesture, content information or in-tonation. Here, we focus on intonation and inves-tigate how contrast in information structure is prosodically marked in spontaneous speech. Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, Steedman 2000) distinguishes theme and rheme as elements of information structure. In some cases they can be distinguished by the pitch ac-cent with which the corresponding words are realised. We experimentally evoke instances o