The emergence of shared symbol systems is considered to be a pivotal moment in human evolution and human development. These changes are normally explained by reference to changes in people's internal cognitive processes. We present 2 experiments which provide evidence that changes in the external, collaborative processes that people use to communicate can also affect the structure and organization of symbol systems independently of cognitive change. We propose that mutual‐modifiability—opportunities for people to edit or manipulate each other's contributions—is a key (...) constraint on the emergence of complex symbol systems. We discuss the implications for models of language development and the origins of compositionality. (shrink)

Healey et al. use experiments with chat dialogues to test the hypothesis that language co‐ordination is driven by ‘running repairs’. They replace signals of understanding such as “okay” with weaker, ‘spoof’ signals like “ummm”, and replace specific requests for clarification like “on the left?” with signals that suggest a higher degree of misunderstanding like “what?”. The latter manipulation causes participants to switch rapidly to more abstract forms of referring expression.

Healey et al. introduce the special issue with a brief overview of work on communication in the Cognitive Sciences and some of the historical and conceptual influences that have marginalized the study of miscommunication. Drawing on more recent work in Cognitive Science and Conversation Analysis they argue that miscommunication is in fact a highly structured, ubiquitous phenomenon that is fundamental to human interaction.

McCabe & Healey argue that in patient‐psychiatrist interaction, the more the participants engage in repair, i.e., trying to fix potential misunderstandings, the better the outcomes of the interaction, as measured by treatment adherence and the quality of the Dr – patient relationship. This holds both for self‐repair, when psychiatrists fix their own utterances, as well as other‐repair, where patients try to fix the understanding displayed by the psychiatrist.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that participants in conversation can sometimes act as a coalition. This implies a level of conversational organization in which groups of individuals form a coherent unit. This paper investigates the implications of this phenomenon for psycholinguistic and semantic models of shared context in dialog. We present a corpus study of multiparty dialog which shows that, in certain circumstances, people with different levels of overt involvement in a conversation, that is, one responding and one not, can nonetheless access (...) the same shared context. We argue that contemporary models of shared context need to be adapted to capture this situation. To address this, we propose “grounding by proxy,” in which one person can respond on behalf of another, as a simple mechanism by which shared context can accumulate for a coalition as a whole. We explore this hypothesis experimentally by investigating how people in a task-oriented coalition respond when their shared context appears to be weakened. The results provide evidence that, by default, coalition members act on each other's behalf, and when this fails they work to compensate. We conclude that this points to the need for a new concept of collective grounding acts and a corresponding concept of collective contexts in psycholinguistic and semantic models of dialog. (shrink)

3 In live performances seated audiences have restricted opportunities for response. Some 4 responses are obvious, such as applause and cheering, but there are also many apparently 5 incidental movements including posture shifts, fixing hair, scratching and adjusting glasses. 6 Do these movements provide clues to people’s level of engagement with a performance? Our 7 basic hypothesis is that audience responses are part of a bi-directional system of audience- 8 performer communication. This communication is part of what distinguishes live from (...) recorded 9 performance and underpins live performers’ moment-to-moment sense of how well a performance 10 is going. Here we investigate the range of visible real-time movements of audiences in four live 11 contemporary dance performances. Video recordings of performers and audiences were analysed 12 using computer vision techniques for extracting face, hand and body movement data. The 13 meaning of audience movements were analysed by comparing clips of the audience at moments 14 of maximum and minimum movement to expert and novice judges. The results show that audience 15 clips with the lowest overall movement are judged as displaying the highest engagement. In 16 addition, we found that while there is no systematic relationship between audience and dancers 17 movement, hands seem to play an especially significant role since they move significantly more 18 compared to the rest of the body. We draw on these findings to argue that collective stillness is 19 an especially salient signal of audience engagement. (shrink)

We present empirical evidence from dialogue that challenges some of the key assumptions in the Pickering & Garrod (P&G) model of speaker-hearer coordination in dialogue. The P&G model also invokes an unnecessarily complex set of mechanisms. We show that a computational implementation, currently in development and based on a simpler model, can account for more of this type of dialogue data.

Social robots have limited social competences. This leads us to view them as depictions of social agents rather than actual social agents. However, people also have limited social competences. We argue that all social interaction involves the depiction of social roles and that they originate in, and are defined by, their function in accounting for failures of social competence.

Empirical evidence from dialogue, both corpus and experimental, highlights the importance of interaction in language use – and this raises some questions for Christiansen & Chater's proposals. We endorse C&C's call for an integrated framework but argue that their emphasis on local, individual production and comprehension makes it difficult to accommodate the ubiquitous, interactive, and defeasible processes of clarification and repair in conversation.

The interactive alignment model treats within- and between-individual co-ordination as essentially equivalent. It is argued that this leads to a conservative account of alignment that presupposes high levels of linguistic and conceptual co-ordination. Data from the maze task are used to argue that this approach is not sufficient to account for important co-ordination phenomena.