This paper describes a corpus of unscripted, task-oriented dialogues which has been designed, digitally recorded, and transcribed to support the study of spontaneous speech on many levels. The corpus uses the Map Task (Brown, Anderson, Yule, and Shillcock, 1983) in which speakers must collaborate verbally to reproduce on one participant's map a route printed on the other's. In all, the corpus includes four conversations from each of 64 young adults and manipulates the following variables: familiarity of speakers, eye contact between speakers, matching between landmarks on the participants' maps, opportunities for contrastive stress, and phonological characteristics of landmark names. The motivations for the design are set out and basic corpus statistics are presented.

A variety of theoretical frameworks predict the resemblance of behaviors between two people engaged in communication, in the form of coordination, mimicry, or alignment. However, little is known about the time course of the behavior matching, even though there is evidence that dyads synchronize oscillatory motions (e.g., postural sway). This study examined the temporal structure of nonoscillatory actions-language, facial, and gestural behaviors-produced during a route communication task. The focus was the temporal relationship between matching behaviors in the interlocutors (e.g., facial behavior in one interlocutor vs. the same facial behavior in the other interlocutor). Cross-recurrence analysis revealed that within each category tested (language, facial, gestural), interlocutors synchronized matching behaviors, at temporal lags short enough to provide imitation of one interlocutor by the other, from one conversational turn to the next. Both social and cognitive variables predicted the degree of temporal organization. These findings suggest that the temporal structure of matching behaviors provides low-level and low-cost resources for human interaction.

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Three experiments are presented that investigated the recognition of words after their acoustic offsets in conversational speech. Utterances randomly selected from the speech of24 individuals (total N=288) were gated in one-word increments and heard by 12 listeners each. Of the successful recognitions, 21 %occurred after the acoustic offset of the word in question and in the presence of subsequent context. The majority of late recognitions implicate subsequent context in the recognition process. Late recognitions were distributed nonrandomly with respect to the characteristics of the stimulus word tokens. Control experiments demonstrated that late recognitions were not artifacts of eliminating discourse context, of imposing artificial word boundaries, or of repeating words within successive gated presentations. The effects could be replicated only if subsequent context was available. The implications are discussed for models of word recognition in continuous speech.A decade and a half of research on the recognition of words in fluent speech has demonstrated that under the right conditions listeners can apply acoustic and higherlevel information to this task more or less instantaneously (Grosjean, 1980;Marslen-Wilson, 1973;Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980;Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978). Models of word recognition designed around these fmdings have consequently emphasized the optimal functioning of word recognition processes. The following descriptions of the process of listening to speech appear to describe a device that utilizes preceding context only and that starts a new cycle at the onset of each new word:Utterances are indeed understood as they are heard; ... the listenerconstructsa syntactic and semanticinterpretation of the input word-by-word as he hears it, and ... he actively uses this information to guide his processing of the subsequent wordsin the string. (Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, & Seidenberg, 1978, p. 240) Speech is processed sequentially, word by word ... the words in an utterance are recognized one after another ... listenersknow where wordsbeginand end by recognizing them in order. (Cole & Jakimik, 1980, pp. 133-134) We suggestthat in perception of conversational speechunder good listening conditions, recognition of one word is This study was supported by Grant GRlC78377 from the Science and Engineering Research Council (U.K.) to H. S. Thompson and E. G. Bard. Speech materials were drawn from those prepared under the auspices of grants by the Education and Social Science Research Council (U.K.) to J. Laver and E. G. Bard (HR 6130) and to G. Brown (HR 3601 complete before recognition of the following word begins. (Cole & Jakimik, 1980, p. 149) Increasingly, however, it has been suggested that the human speech recognition mechanism operates in a more varied fashion than these statements imply. Experimental evidence of less than optimal processing dates from the experiments of Pickett and Pollack (1963;, 1964, who used a gating technique in which listeners were asked to identify all the words con...