This work provides initial evidence of reciprocity in conversation. We tested whether conversations with contribution imbalances brought on by task demands contained attempts to redress the created imbalance. Pairs of participants identified public art via phone communication. One member of the pair, the director, gave instructions using a map while the other, the follower, walked around a small town finding public art pieces. Later, trained raters coded the participants’ transcribed conversational turns as either on-task or off-task. As observed in similar studies, directors spoke more in on-task portions of the dialogue. We newly found that in off-task communication, followers spoke more than their directors and used a greater number of words per turn than their directors. We interpret the pattern as reflecting behaviors leading toward balance in contributions across the conversation as a whole, a process we refer to as reciprocity in conversation.

We examined the predictive value of wait signals for sarcasm in online debate forums.  In a corpus comparison we examined the word frequency of um and uh across six corpora.  In general, there were far more fillers in spoken corpora than written corpora.  We also found that the proportion of ums to uhs varied by corpus type.  In Experiment 1 we tested whether the inclusion of um or uh at the beginning of online debate forum posts led to higher probability of those posts being classified as sarcastic by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.  We found that posts beginning with these items were twice as likely to be labeled sarcastic. In Experiment 2 we tested fillers and ellipses in the middle of posts.  We found that posts including these items were approximately three to five times more likely to be labeled sarcastic. We compared results to other signals like the word obviously and quotation marks.  Signals that indicate delay in written communication cue readers to non-literal meaning.

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The Map Task (Anderson et al., 1991) and Tangram Task (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) are traditional referential communication tasks that are used in psycholinguistics research to demonstrate how conversational partners mutually agree on descriptions (or referring expressions) for landmarks or unusual target objects. These highly-controlled, laboratory-based tasks take place under conditions that are relatively unusual for naturally-occurring conversations (Speed, Wnuk, & Majid, 2016). In this study, we used the Artwalk Task (Liu, Fox Tree, & Walker, 2016) – a real world-situated blend of the Map Task and Tangram Task – to demonstrate that the process of negotiating referring expressions ‘in the wild’ is similar to the process that takes place in a laboratory. In Artwalk, participant pairs communicated via a Skype-to-mobile phone connection. One participant guided the other through a small downtown area with the goal of identifying public art objects, finding objects twice during two rounds. In addition to replicating laboratory results, we also found that acquaintanceship and extraversion influenced the number of unique descriptors used by dyads in this task. In Round 1, introverts in stranger dyads used fewer descriptors but introverts in friend dyads were indistinguishable from extraverts. The influence of extraversion declined by Round 2. This study suggests that referent negotiation observed in labs is generalizable but that naturalistic communication is subject to social and personality factors that may not be as influential in laboratory conditions.

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