Forms of introduction in dialogues: Their discourse contexts and communicative consequences

Abstract

For effective communication to occur, speakers must share enough knowledge t o understand one another's contributions-they must achieve "mutual knowledge". A critical point in a dialogue is therefore when one speaker wishes to introduce a new item. Previous research has shown how speakers collaborate to achieve mutual knowledge at such points in a dialogue. In this paper, we show that speakers vary in how effectively they collaborate with their partners on a communicative task. We demonstrate that there are a number of different ways in which new information can be introduced and that the choices speakers make influence how successful such collaborations are likely to be. Speakers who use question form introductions are more likely to elicit informative feedback from their partners and to communicate successfully.

Let’s you do that: Sharing the cognitive burdens of dialogue

“…A chain of inferences and investigations are required to discover what problem Horace's reply must solve. Though Helen's gnomic replies might seem positively unhelpful, in a route communication task like the one used in the present paper, similarly underspecified replies were more common than those which made it plain just where speaker's and listener's knowledge diverged (Anderson et al, 1991;Anderson & Boyle, 1994;Bard et al, 2000).…”

The DCIEM Map Task Corpus: Spontaneous dialogue under sleep deprivation and drug treatment

“…Because the maps dier, the task is not straightforward and subjects pursue it attentively. In other corpora using this task, the HCRC Map Task Corpus [1] and the Chiba University Map Task Corpus, normal young adult subjects not exposed to additional stresses show a range of abilities to pursue the goal eectively [2]. suciently high instrumental analysis…”

“…In earlier work on the map task, we h a v e found that one very good way to encourage accurate performance is to seek feedback actively at critical junctures in a dialogue, in particular at the point where landmarks are introduced for the rst time [2]: introductions of new items within questions about the partner's awareness of the item correlate both with informative feedback from partners and with lower route deviation scores. To determine if Modanil subjects were abbreviating their dialogues at the cost of omitting such useful exchanges, we examined Part 1 of the present C orpus, This provides a small-scale balanced factorial sample which includes one dialogue from each of the 3 successive d a ys of the sleepless period for each speaker in each drug condition.…”

Some notes on priming, alignment, and self-monitoring

“…Degree of reduction seemed to be based only on whether the reference was given information for the speaker, and not on whether it was part of the common ground. Additionally, speakers will sometimes use definite descriptions (to mark the referent as given information; Haviland & Clark 1974) when the referent is visible to them, even when they know it is not available to their interlocutor (Anderson & Boyle 1994).…”

“…Degree of reduction seemed to be based only on whether the reference was given information for the speaker, and not on whether it was part of the common ground. Additionally, speakers will sometimes use definite descriptions (to mark the referent as given information; Haviland & Clark 1974) when the referent is visible to them, even when they know it is not available to their interlocutor (Anderson & Boyle 1994).Nevertheless, under certain circumstances interlocutors do engage in strategic inference relating to (full) common ground. As Horton and Keysar (1996) found, with less time pressure speakers often do take account of common ground in formulating their utterances.…”