Quantifying the interplay of conversational devices in building mutual understanding.

Abstract

Humans readily engage in idle chat and heated discussions and negotiate tough joint decisions without ever having to think twice about how to keep the conversation grounded in mutual understanding. However, current attempts at identifying and assessing the conversational devices that make this possible are fragmented across disciplines and investigate single devices within single contexts. We present a comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate conversational devices, their relations, and how they adjust to contextual demands. In two corpus studies, we systematically test the role of three conversational devices: backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Contrasting affiliative and task-oriented conversations within participants, we find that conversational devices adaptively adjust to the increased need for precision in the latter: We show that low-precision devices such as backchannels are more frequent in affiliative conversations, whereas more costly but higher-precision mechanisms, such as specific repairs, are more frequent in task-oriented conversations. Further, task-oriented conversations involve higher complementarity of contributions in terms of the content and perspective: lower semantic entrainment and less frequent (but richer) lexical and syntactic entrainment. Finally, we show that the observed variations in the use of conversational devices are potentially adaptive: pairs of interlocutors that show stronger linguistic complementarity perform better across the two tasks. By combining motivated comparisons of several conversational contexts and theoretically informed computational analyses of empirical data the present work lays the foundations for a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the use of conversational devices in dialogue.

The puzzle of ideography

“…Morin suggests that the reason these apparently fundamental forms of human signification never evolve to become generalised ideographies is because of the lack of procedures for standardisation. We agree that any generalised form of communication will depend on the continuous contextualised negotiation of meaning (Dideriksen, Christiansen, Tylén, Dingemanse, & Fusaroli, 2022). However, we also suggest that there might be semiotic factors intrinsic to the materiality of certain media that challenge the evolution of ideographiesin particular, to the extent they depend on iconicity.…”

The Dynamic Interplay of Kinetic and Linguistic Coordination in Danish and Norwegian Conversation

“…Therefore, control analyses were conducted in order to ensure that any entrainment measure used in the present study is above such baseline, chance‐level entrainment. Results of the linguistic control analyses are reported by Dideriksen, Christiansen, Tylén, Dingemanse, and Fusaroli (2022) and show that all linguistic levels of entrainment are above the chance level. For the kinetic variables, we performed an analysis using shuffled data.…”

“…For both the head and hands, we found no evidence for kinetic entrainment differing between the languages, nor did we find evidence for the kinetic‐linguistic association being modulated by language. This is interesting because it means that, despite the difference in sound structure between the two languages likely causing increased linguistic entrainment in Danish (Dideriksen et al., 2022; Trecca et al., 2019), the patterns of kinetic entrainment and relations between linguistic and kinetic entrainment remain similar. It should be noted that while we did not find statistical differences between Danish and Norwegian in our models, the complete network plots (Supplementary Material) suggest that there may be some differences between the two languages.…”

Cognitive Science Progresses Toward Interactive Frameworks

“…Two heads can indeed become better than one, as long as their joint cognition is properly coordinated. Note that this proper coordination does not solely involve synchronization of similar cognitive and behavioral processes but often requires a mesh of complementary processes as well (Dale & Spivey, 2018; Dideriksen, Christiansen, Tylén, Dingemanse, & Fusaroli, 2022; Hutchins, 1995; Sebanz, Bekkering, & Knoblich, 2006).…”