Audience Design in Multiparty Conversation

Differentiation and integration: The addressee perspective-taking strategy in three-party conversation

In conversations, people take the perspectives of others when engaging in referential understanding. Previous studies have primarily focused on dialogues between two participants. However, as the number of conversational partners increases, the perspective-taking strategies may change. This study specifically investigated a situation in which the addressee faces two speakers who take turns giving referential instructions. In Experiment 1, the perspectives of Speaker 1 and the addressee participants were consistent, while the perspectives of Speaker 2 and the addressee participants were inconsistent. In Experiment 2, the perspectives of both speakers were consistent but differed from the addressee's perspective. The results showed that, in Experiment 1, participants distinguished between the perspectives of the two speakers when interpreting noun reference, but no difference was found in Experiment 2. However, when comparing the results of Experiments 1 and 2, it was found that, despite the perspective of Speaker 2 remaining unchanged, participants in Experiment 1 were more egocentric than in Experiment 2 when interpreting Speaker 2's discourse. The pattern of strategic change was aligned with the interpretation of Speaker 1. This suggests that participants, to some extent, integrate the perspectives of both speakers. The results were further discussed based on the consideration of their partner's audience design strategies, use of a "Grounding by Proxy" strategy, or the calculation of a probabilistic weight of different perspectives.

Understanding perspective-taking in multiparty conversations: insights from Mandarin nouns

Individuals frequently adopt others' perspectives both when interpreting language and when formulating their own responses in conversation. This experiment tested how participants used perspective information to resolve references for bare nouns in Mandarin. Specifically, it explored whether, when faced with two interlocutors, participants distinguished between each individual's perspective or considered both as a whole. Using a classical referential game, the study manipulated the visual perspectives of two partners. In Experiment 1, both speakers had the same seating direction and visual field, and the results showed that participants equally took their perspectives into account above chance levels, providing a baseline finding for referential resolution of Mandarin bare nouns in perspective-taking studies. In Experiment 2, both speakers had the same seating direction but one of them shared the larger portion of visual field with the participants. The results showed that participants took the perspectives of the two speakers independently, while also comparing the perspectives of both interlocutors to facilitate quicker and more accurate referential resolution. These findings demonstrate that perspective-taking is a complex and dynamic process, providing evidence for the study of perspective-taking in Mandarin and contributing insights into comprehension processing in multiparty conversations.

Remembering conversation in group settings

Individuals can take on various roles in conversation. Some roles are more active, with the participant responsible for guiding that conversation in pursuit of the group's goals. Other roles are more passive, like when one is an overhearer. Classic accounts posit that overhearers do not form conversational common ground because they do not actively participate in the communication process. Indeed, empirical findings demonstrate that overhearers do not comprehend conversation as well as active participants. Little is known, however, about long-term memory for conversations in overhearers. Overhearers play an important role in legal settings and dispute resolution, and it is critical to understand how their memory differs in quality and content from active participants in conversation. Here we examine - for the first time - the impact of one's conversational role as a speaker, addressee, or overhearer on subsequent memory for conversation. Data from 60 participants recalling 60 conversations reveal that after a brief delay, overhearers recall significantly less content from conversation compared to both speakers and addressees, and that the content they do recall is less accurately sourced to its actual contributor. Mnemonic similarity is higher between active conversational participants than between active participants and overhearers. These findings provide key support for the hypothesis that the process of forming common ground in interactive conversation shapes and supports memory for that conversation.

Interaction structure constrains the emergence of conventions in group communication

Real-world communication frequently requires language producers to address more than one comprehender at once, yet most psycholinguistic research focuses on one-on-one communication. As the audience size grows, interlocutors face new challenges that do not arise in dyads. They must consider multiple perspectives and weigh multiple sources of feedback to build shared understanding. Here, we ask which properties of the group's interaction structure facilitate successful communication. We used a repeated reference game paradigm in which directors instructed between one and five matchers to choose specific targets out of a set of abstract figures. Across 313 games (N = 1,319 participants), we manipulated several key constraints on the group's interaction, including the amount of feedback that matchers could give to directors and the availability of peer interaction between matchers. Across groups of different sizes and interaction constraints, describers produced increasingly efficient utterances and matchers made increasingly accurate selections. Critically, however, we found that smaller groups and groups with less-constrained interaction structures ("thick channels") showed stronger convergence to group-specific conventions than large groups with constrained interaction structures ("thin channels"), which struggled with convention formation. Overall, these results shed light on the core structural factors that enable communication to thrive in larger groups.

Partner-Specific Communication Deficits in Individuals With Alzheimer's Disease

Purpose Speakers adjust referential expressions to the listeners' knowledge while communicating, a phenomenon called "audience design." While individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show difficulties in discourse production, it is unclear whether they exhibit preserved partner-specific audience design. The current study examined if individuals with AD demonstrate partner-specific audience design skills. Method Ten adults with mild-to-moderate AD and 12 healthy older adults performed a referential communication task with two experimenters (E1 and E2). At first, E1 and participants completed an image-sorting task, allowing them to establish shared labels. Then, during testing, both experimenters were present in the room, and participants described images to either E1 or E2 (randomly alternating). Analyses focused on the number of words participants used to describe each image and whether they reused shared labels. Results During testing, participants in both groups produced shorter descriptions when describing familiar images versus new images, demonstrating their ability to learn novel knowledge. When they described familiar images, healthy older adults modified their expressions depending on the current partner's knowledge, producing shorter expressions and more established labels for the knowledgeable partner (E1) versus the naïve partner (E2), but individuals with AD were less likely to do so. Conclusions The current study revealed that both individuals with AD and the control participants were able to acquire novel knowledge, but individuals with AD tended not to flexibly adjust expressions depending on the partner's knowledge state. Conversational inefficiency and difficulties observed in AD may, in part, stem from disrupted audience design skills.

What's New to You? Preschoolers' Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency

Speech disfluencies (e.g., “Point to thee um turtle”) can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner’s disfluency based on their estimate of that partner’s knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children’s eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child’s partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker’s perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker’s entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners’ knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.