Contextual Integration in Multiparty Audience Design

Abstract

Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective-different knowledge, different beliefs, and a distinct physical context. Despite the ubiquity of multiparty conversation in everyday life, little is known about the processes by which speakers design language in multiparty conversation. While prior evidence demonstrates that speakers design utterances to accommodate addressee knowledge in multiparty conversation, it is unknown if and how speakers encode and combine different types of perspective information. Here we test whether speakers encode the perspective of multiple addressees, and then simultaneously consider their knowledge and physical context during referential design in a three-party conversation. Analyses of referential form-expression length, disfluency, and elaboration rate-in an interactive multiparty conversation demonstrate that speakers do take into consideration both addressee knowledge and physical context when designing utterances, consistent with a knowledge-scene integration view. These findings point to an audience design process that takes as input multiple types of representations about the perspectives of multiple addressees, and that bases the informational content of the to-be-designed utterance on a combination of the perspectives of the intended addressees. process involves considerations of the likely knowledge and beliefs of a single addressee -tailoring what is said to their perspective. When we consider the case of multiparty conversation, however, this process becomes decidedly more complex. Consider that each individual necessarily brings to the conversation different knowledge and beliefs (due to different life experiences), and a distinct physical context (as two people cannot occupy the same place at the same time). Thus, when simultaneously addressing two or more addressees, the speaker must design what they will say for a group of addressees who have different communicative needs due to their distinct perspectives. The current literature contains only a small number of studies examining audience design in multiparty conversation, and as a result, very little is known about if or how this process unfolds. In a new line of research, we have begun to ask basic mechanistic questions about how speakers design language for groups of addressees who differ in their background knowledge for the topic at hand. The present research builds on these findings to explore if and how speakers take into consideration two different types of perspective informationknowledge and physical context-in multiparty audience design.A classic paradigm for examining audience design is the referential communication task, in which pairs of participants work together to rearrange a set of abstract images multiple times (Krauss & Weinheimer, 1964, 1966. In this task, the conversational partners jointly create brief labels for these images across the course of the conversation

Body synchrony in triadic interaction

“…Here we analyse a corpus of triadic human interaction. Triads offer an opportunity to tap into the potential mechanisms underlying a variety of discourse processes, such as turn-taking, reference and conceptual pacts [ 39 – 42 ]. This prior research motivates the present focus on triads as a source of information about body synchrony itself.…”

What is retained about common ground? Distinct effects of linguistic and visual co-presence

“…For example, conversational partners can integrate different sources of information from the discourse context, such as the type of discourse prompt and the partner's feedback; such information may be combined to model common ground in a gradient fashion (see Brown-Schmidt, 2012) rather than all-or-nothing, perhaps even tracking the strength of evidence with which information has been grounded (Clark & Schaefer, 1989). Recent work (Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2019) demonstrated that speakers can combine at least two different kinds of information (prior knowledge and visual perspective) in order to design referring expressions appropriate for two addressees at once during multi-party conversation. In that study, one addressee was always the knowledgeable one, and the speaker viewed a screen showing what each addressee's visual perspective was (so did not have to track that information in memory), lessening the burden on the speaker.…”

“…Despite the potential for interference in this particular task (the same item was shared in different ways with each partner), each addressee's identity was remarkably successful in cueing the appropriate co-presence status. In previous studies, the conversational partner's informational needs could be summarized as single, global constraint that could be applied over the entire interaction with that partner-for instance, for cuing category associations for subsets of items (e.g., with this partner, I have matched cards of dogs, but not of turtles, e.g., Horton & Gerrig, 2002, 2005b or for cuing the status of information of a more extended stretch of discourse (e.g., this partner has heard this entire story before, e.g., Galati & Brennan, 2010, or is knowledgeable about these objects, e.g., Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2019). In the conversational context of Phase 2, speakers described individual items appropriately to specific partners, even though the items' information status varied and could not be reconstructed from a single categorical constraint.…”

“…In this view, common ground can be characterized in terms of the conditions of co-presence under which information is shared: namely, linguistic copresence (sharing information through spoken utterances), and visual co-presence (sharing information through the physical environment) (Clark & Marshall, 1981). There is evidence that linguistic and visual co-presence distinctly shape how speakers refer to entities (e.g., Brennan, 2005;Clark & Krych, 2004;Gergle, Kraut, & Fussell, 2004), that speakers can keep track of what they've discussed with whom (e.g., Brennan & Clark, 1996;Galati & Brennan, 2010;Horton & Gerrig, 2005b;Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2018), and that speakers can design referring expressions understandable to two addressees (with differing knowledge and individual perspectives) in the same multiparty conversation (Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2019). However, it is still largely unknown whether speakers can keep track of the co-presence conditions (or perceptual modalities) under which common ground was established with different conversational partners, and subsequently adapt the referring expressions they address to each partner appropriately.…”

What is retained about common ground? Distinct effects of linguistic and visual co-presence

“…In this view, common ground can be characterized in terms of the conditions of co-presence under which information is shared: namely, linguistic copresence (sharing information through spoken utterances), and visual co-presence (sharing information through the physical environment) (Clark & Marshall, 1981). There is evidence that linguistic and visual co-presence each shape how speakers refer to entities (e.g., Brennan, 2005;Clark & Krych, 2004;Gergle, Kraut, & Fussell, 2004), that speakers can keep track of what they've discussed with whom (e.g., Brennan & Clark, 1996;Galati & Brennan, 2010;Horton & Gerrig, 2005b;Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2018), and that speakers can design referring expressions understandable to two addressees (with differing knowledge and individual perspectives) in the same multiparty conversation (Yoon & Brown-Schmidt, 2019). However, it is still largely unknown whether speakers can keep track of the co-presence conditions (or perceptual modalities) under which common ground was established with different conversational partners, and subsequently adapt the referring expressions they address to each partner appropriately.…”