Alignment and task success in spoken dialogue

Reitter, David; Moore, Johanna D.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2014.05.008

Cited by 125 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

105

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This assumption is in line with studies that showed higher alignment in task-oriented discourse compared to free natural speech (Reitter et al, 2006;Reitter & Moore, 2014) and may explain why Healey, Purver, & Howes (2014) found divergence rather than alignment in free natural speech, whereas we found rather strong alignment in our task. In addition, the structure of the task encouraged cumulative priming, which has also been found to increase alignment (Kaschak et al, 2006).…”

Section: Alignment In Highly Structured Task-oriented Discoursesupporting

confidence: 93%

Temporal Effects of Alignment in Text-Based, Task-Oriented Discourse

Foltz

Gaspers

Meyer

et al. 2014

Discourse Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Communicative alignment refers to adaptation to one's communication partner. Temporal aspects of such alignment have been little explored. This paper examines temporal aspects of lexical and syntactic alignment (i.e. tendencies to use the interlocutor's lexical items and syntactic structures) in task-oriented discourse. In particular, we investigate whether lexical and syntactic alignment increases throughout the discourse, and whether alignment contributes to speedy task completion. We present data from a text-based chat game, where participants instructed each other on where to place objects in a grid. Our methodological approach allows calculating a robust baseline and revealed reliable lexical and syntactic alignment. However, only lexical alignment, but not syntactic alignment, was sensitive to temporal aspects in that only lexical alignment increased throughout the discourse and positively affected task completion time. We discuss how these results relate to the communicative task and mention implications for models of alignment.

show abstract

Section: Alignment In Highly Structured Task-oriented Discoursesupporting

confidence: 93%

Temporal Effects of Alignment in Text-Based, Task-Oriented Discourse

Foltz

Gaspers

Meyer

et al. 2014

Discourse Processes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Such adaptations have been observed in many interactional behaviors (Fusaroli, Konvalinka, & Wallot, 2014): from subtle bodily sway (Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003), to speech rate, utterance length and phonetic profile (Fusaroli & Tylén, in press;Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), lexical , and conceptual alignment (Angus, Watson, Smith, Gallois, & Wiles, 2012;Garrod & Anderson, 1987;Garrod & Doherty, 1994). Likewise, a number of studies show that interlocutors tend to align on their use of syntactic constructions beyond particular tokens of referent events: If a speaker uses a double object construction (''the pirate gives the chef an apple") to refer to a ditransitive scene, there is a relatively higher probability that her interlocutor will spontaneously use the same construction to describe analogous but not identical scenes, even though the prepositional object construction (''the pirate gives an apple to the chef") is an equally acceptable alternative (Branigan, Pickering, McLean, & Cleland, 2007;Branigan, Pickering, Stewart, & McLean, 2000;Hopkins, Yuill, & Keller, 2015;Reitter & Moore, 2014). Rather than purely relying on the referent event (structural iconicity), speakers widely rely on the linguistic structures offered by their interlocutor.…”

Section: Environmental Constraint 2: Interactive Alignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems: Structural iconicity, interactive alignment and conventionalization

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Where does linguistic structure come from? Recent gesture elicitation studies have indicated that constituent order (corresponding to for instance subject-verb-object, or SVO in English) may be heavily influenced by human cognitive biases constraining gesture production and transmission. Here we explore the alternative hypothesis that syntactic patterns are motivated by multiple environmental and social-interactional constraints that are external to the cognitive domain. In three experiments, we systematically investigate different motivations for structure in the gestural communication of simple transitive events. The first experiment indicates that, if participants communicate about different types of events, manipulation events (e.g. someone throwing a cake) and construction events (e.g. someone baking a cake), they spontaneously and systematically produce different constituent orders, SOV and SVO respectively, thus following the principle of structural iconicity. The second experiment shows that participants' choice of constituent order is also reliably influenced by social-interactional forces of interactive alignment, that is, the tendency to re-use an interlocutor's previous choice of constituent order, thus potentially overriding affordances for iconicity. Lastly, the third experiment finds that the relative frequency distribution of referent event types motivates the stabilization and conventionalization of a single constituent order for the communication of different types of events. Together, our results demonstrate that constituent order in emerging gestural communication systems is shaped and stabilized in response to multiple external environmental and social factors: structural iconicity, interactive alignment and distributional frequency.

show abstract

“…For example, Bock (1986) found that when speakers were presented with a passive construction such as The boy was kissed by the girl as a description of a picture, they were more likely to describe a new picture using a similar syntactic structure. Effects of priming have been detected with a range of syntactic constructions, including NP variants (Cleland and Pickering, 2003), the order of main and auxiliary verbs (Hartsuiker and Westenberg, 2000), and other structures, in a variety of languages (Pickering and Ferreira, 2008), and in children (Huttenlocher et al, 2004;Van Beijsterveldt and Van Hell, 2009), but also syntactic phrase-structure rules in general (Reitter et al, 2006;Reitter and Moore, 2014).…”

Section: Modeling Syntactic Priming In Language Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward Cognitively Constrained Models of Language Processing: A Review

et al. 2017

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language processing is not an isolated capacity, but is embedded in other aspects of our cognition. However, it is still largely unexplored to what extent and how language processing interacts with general cognitive resources. This question can be investigated with cognitively constrained computational models, which simulate the cognitive processes involved in language processing. The theoretical claims implemented in cognitive models interact with general architectural constraints such as memory limitations. This way, it generates new predictions that can be tested in experiments, thus generating new data that can give rise to new theoretical insights. This theory-model-experiment cycle is a promising method for investigating aspects of language processing that are difficult to investigate with more traditional experimental techniques. This review specifically examines the language processing models of Lewis and Vasishth (2005), Reitter et al. (2011), andVan Rij et al. (2010), all implemented in the cognitive architecture Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (Anderson et al., 2004). These models are all limited by the assumptions about cognitive capacities provided by the cognitive architecture, but use different linguistic approaches. Because of this, their comparison provides insight into the extent to which assumptions about general cognitive resources influence concretely implemented models of linguistic competence. For example, the sheer speed and accuracy of human language processing is a current challenge in the field of cognitive modeling, as it does not seem to adhere to the same memory and processing capacities that have been found in other cognitive processes. Architecturebased cognitive models of language processing may be able to make explicit which language-specific resources are needed to acquire and process natural language. The review sheds light on cognitively constrained models of language processing from two angles: we discuss (1) whether currently adopted cognitive assumptions meet the requirements for language processing, and (2) how validated cognitive architectures can constrain linguistically motivated models, which, all other things being equal, will increase the cognitive plausibility of these models. Overall, the evaluation of cognitively constrained models of language processing will allow for a better understanding of the relation between data, linguistic theory, cognitive assumptions, and explanation.

show abstract

Alignment and task success in spoken dialogue

Cited by 125 publications

References 40 publications

Temporal Effects of Alignment in Text-Based, Task-Oriented Discourse

Temporal Effects of Alignment in Text-Based, Task-Oriented Discourse

Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems: Structural iconicity, interactive alignment and conventionalization

Toward Cognitively Constrained Models of Language Processing: A Review

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About