Conversational Common Ground and Memory Processes in Language Production (original) (raw)
Related papers
2008
Two experiments examined the role of common ground in the production and on-line interpretation of wh-questions such as What's above the cow with shoes? Experiment 1 examined unscripted conversation, and found that speakers consistently use wh-questions to inquire about information known only to the addressee. Addressees were sensitive to this tendency, and quickly directed attention toward private entities when interpreting these questions. A second experiment replicated the interpretation findings in a more constrained setting. These results add to previous evidence that the common ground influences initial language processes, and suggests that the strength and polarity of common ground effects may depend on contributions of sentence type as well as the interactivity of the situation.
Memory & Cognition, 2012
Some accounts of common ground assume that successful communication requires detailed consideration of others' knowledge. In two studies, we provide evidence for an alternative account that views common ground as being mediated in part through domain-general memory mechanisms. On each trial, participants heard prerecorded instructions from one of two speakers indicating which of two displayed pictures to select. During an initial association phase, each speaker repeatedly referred to different sets of pictures. In Experiment 1, we contrasted a "betweenspeaker mapping" condition, in which each speaker referred to only one picture from critical item pairs (e.g., the cat drinking milk vs. the cat sitting up), and a "within-speaker mapping" condition, in which each speaker referred to both pictures within each pair, although item categories differed across speakers. On subsequent test trials, we recorded participants' eye fixations to critical displays that included both items from a category pair. Prior to the linguistic point of disambiguation, participants in the between-speaker mapping condition were more likely to fixate on the picture previously described by the current speaker, suggesting that knowledge associated with the speaker was prompting expectations for which picture would be the intended target. In Experiment 2, we used two prerecorded speakers of the same gender to strengthen the claim that the relevant implicit memory associations are speaker-specific. These results demonstrate how domain-general memory associations can be an important constraint upon language use.
2005
Written by some of the leading figures in the fields of conversation analysis, discursive psychology and ethnomethodology, this book looks at the challenging implications of new discourse-based approaches to the topic of cognition. Up to now, cognition has primarily been studied in experimental settings. This volume shows how cognition can be reworked using analyses of engaging examples of real life interaction such as conversations between friends, relationship counselling sessions and legal hearings. It includes an extended introduction that overviews the history and context of cognitive research and its basic assumptions to provide a frame for understanding the specific examples discussed, as well as surveying cutting edge debates about discourse and cognition. This comprehensive and accessible book opens up important new ways of understanding the relation between language and cognition.
Discerning the Relations Between Conversation and Cognition
Human Studies, 2009
Although hailing from cognate analytical schools, the contributors to Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter's edited volume Conversation and Cognition hold a remarkable diversity of views on the nature of ''mental states'' and their import for the purposes of analyzing naturally occurring interaction. I offer a critical analysis of some of the contributors' discussions of cognition in social interaction in an effort to clarify some obstinate issues with respect to the meanings of words in our cognitive vocabulary (e.g. ''thought'' and ''realization'') and their identification in analyses of conversation. Keywords Conversation analysis Á Discursive psychology Á Ethnomethodology Á Human mentality Á Meaning Á Wittgenstein What is the relationship between thinking and speaking, between mind and language? While these are central questions for philosophical psychology, in Conversation and Cognition, they are uniquely addressed through the empirical examination of naturally occurring human interaction. Conversation and Cognition is an important book, with many virtues. In the past, the possible relations between pragmatic analyses of naturally occurring talk and cognitive accounts of human action have been unclear at best. Many analysts of conversation have preferred to examine the local organization of talk with a principled indifference to the kinds of questions of inner causes or cognitive mechanisms that motivate work in psychology and cognitive science. Rarely have they made explicit their stance on the existence or nature of speakers' mental states and processes or their possible role in human interaction. Thus, this volume should
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2007
In typical interactions, speakers frequently produce utterances that appear to reflect beliefs about the common ground shared with particular addressees. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) proposed that one important basis for audience design is the manner in which conversational partners serve as cues for the automatic retrieval of associated information from memory. This paper reports the results of two experiments demonstrating the influence of partner-specific memory associations on language production. Following an initial task designed to establish associations between specific words (Experiment 1) or object categories (Experiment 2) and each of two partners, participants named a series of pictures in the context of the same two individuals. Naming latencies were shortest for responses associated with the current partner, and were not significantly correlated with explicit recall of partner-item associations. Such partner-driven memory retrieval may constrain the information accessible to speakers as they produce utterances for particular addressees. During conversational interactions, the form and content of speakers' utterances are potentially shaped in a variety of ways by the intended audience. Speakers not only adjust global characteristics of their speech, such as overall complexity, in response to the perceived needs of particular types of addressees (e.g., non-native speakers; Bortfeld & Brennan, 1997), but can also make relatively fine-grained adjustments to referential (e.g., , syntactic (e.g., Haywood, Pickering, & Branigan, 2005) and even gestural (e.g., Özyürek, 2002) aspects of their behaviors based on interactions with specific individuals. Taken together, these partner-related adjustments are known as audience design and appear to be a ubiquitous feature of conversational speech. Although utterances routinely show evidence of having been tailored for certain addressees, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie audience design are not well understood. A primary issue concerns the extent to which instances of audience design necessarily emerge on the basis of considerations of the knowledge taken as shared between interlocutors-their common ground. Although individuals are presumed to coordinate interactions on the basis of beliefs about common ground , evidence is mixed regarding when and how this actually occurs (for a discussion, see . For example, speakers sometimes fail to consider addressees as much as they "should," producing utterances that are ambiguous or that show little evidence of addressee-specific adjustments . Conversely, some aspects of utterances that could be potentially helpful for addresses-e.g., articulatory reduction or heavy NP shift -may emerge instead on the basis of speaker-internal constraints.
Social Contexts and Conversational Implicatures in Conversations Among Family Members
ELT Echo : The Journal of English Language Teaching in Foreign Language Context, 2018
Social contexts play important roles in the conversations. The speakers need to always refer to those contexts when conversing. Moreover, conversations do not only contain literal meanings but also meanings beyond the utterances. This study therefore aims to reveal the social contexts that influence how the participants talk and produce conversational implicatures in the conversations,particularly among family members. Four participants are involved with this study. They are a father, mother, son and daughter from one family. The data are taken from the conversations that occur only before school and father's work using recording and note taking. This study shows that the conversation among those four participants is rich of conversational implicatures. There are several types of conversational implicatures found in this study. Those are standard implicature with the highest emergence, particularized conversational implicature, generalized conversational implicature, and a deliberate flouting of the maxims. This study concludes that the use of conversational implicature is strongly influenced by the social contexts of the participants, such as age, power or social status and social distance.
Let’s you do that: Sharing the cognitive burdens of dialogue.
Three accounts of common ground maintenance make different assumptions about speakers' responsibilities regarding listener-privileged information. Duplicated responsibility requires each interlocutor to assimilate the other's knowledge before designing appropriate utterances. Shared responsibility appeals to least collaborative effort . Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition, 22, 1-39.], requiring each interlocutor to report her own privileged knowledge. Cognitive load [Horton, W. S., & Gerrig, R. J. (2005b). The impact of memory demands on audience design during language production. Cognition, 96(2), 127-142.] assumes duplicated responsibility curtailed by processing limitations, so that simpler cues to listener knowledge should be preferred. Three experiments track genuine gaze of instructors at simulated projected gaze of confederate followers whom they guide along a map route. Though instructors can correct off-route gaze, a simply interpretable cue to listener knowledge, they habitually rely on inaccurate, underspecified verbal feedback instead and begin corrections without first checking the follower's gaze. Time pressure discourages corrections accompanied by gaze checking. The results argue for shared responsibility attributable to a limitation in capacity to seek and integrate listener knowledge.
2006
Abstract This article considers the different approaches to cognition in conversation analysis (CA) and discursive psychology (DP). Its points are illustrated through a critical but appreciative consideration of an article by Drew in which he uses conversation analysis to identify 'cognitive moments' in interaction. Problems are identified with Drew's analysis and the conclusions he draws.
The processes of social construction in talk
2006
Sociologists have paid a great deal of attention to the idea that many aspects of human life are socially constructed. However, there has been far less attention to the concrete interactional processes by which this construction occurs. In particular, scholars have neglected how consensual meaning is constructed in verbal interaction. This article outlines nine generic construction tools used in everyday talk, based on a review and synthesis of past work.