Procedural Coordination in the Matching Task

Direct and indirect linguistic measures of common ground in dialogue studies involving a matching task: A systematic review

During dialogue, speakers attempt to adapt messages to their addressee appropriately by taking into consideration their common ground (i.e., all the information mutually known by the conversational partners) to ensure successful communication. Knowing and remembering what information is part of the common ground shared with a given partner and using it during dialogue are crucial skills for social interaction. It is therefore important to better understand how we can measure the use of common ground and to identify the potential associated psychological processes. In this context, a systematic review of the literature was performed to list the linguistic measures of common ground found in dialogue studies involving a matching task and to explore any evidence of cognitive and social mechanisms underlying common ground use in this specific experimental setting, particularly in normal aging and in neuropsychological studies. Out of the 23 articles included in this review, we found seven different linguistic measures of common ground that were classified as either a direct measure of common ground (i.e., measures directly performed on the referential content) or an indirect measure of common ground (i.e., measures assessing the general form of the discourse). This review supports the idea that both types of measures should systematically be used while assessing common ground because they may reflect different concepts underpinned by distinct psychological processes. Given the lack of evidence for the implication of other cognitive and social functions in common ground use in studies involving matching tasks, future research is warranted, particularly in the clinical field.

Self-Repair Increases Referential Coordination

When interlocutors repeatedly describe referents to each other, they rapidly converge on referring expressions which become increasingly systematized and abstract as the interaction progresses. Previous experimental research suggests that interactive repair mechanisms in dialogue underpin convergence. However, this research has so far only focused on the role of other-initiated repair and has not examined whether self-initiated repair might also play a role. To investigate this question, we report the results from a computer-mediated maze task experiment. In this task, participants communicate with each other via an experimental chat tool, which selectively transforms participants' private turn-revisions into public self-repairs that are made visible to the other participant. For example, if a participant, A, types "On the top square," and then before sending, A revises the turn to "On the top row," the server automatically detects the revision and transforms the private turn-revisions into a public self-repair, for example, "On the top square umm I meant row." Participants who received these transformed turns used more abstract and systematized referring expressions, but performed worse at the task. We argue that this is due to the artificial self-repairs causing participants to put more effort into diagnosing and resolving the referential coordination problems they face in the task, yielding better grounded spatial semantics and consequently increased use of abstract referring expressions.

A modified procedure for naming 332 pictures and collecting norms: Using tangram pictures in psycholinguistic studies

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Furthermore, norms for concreteness were also provided owing to the influence of this variable on the processes involved in lexical production. Correlational analyses on all variables were performed on the data collected from French native speakers. This new set of standardized pictures constitutes a reliable database for researchers when they select tangram pictures. Given the abstract nature of tangram pictures, this paper also discusses the similarities and differences with the literature on line drawings, and highlights their value for dialogue psychology studies, for psycholinguistics studies, and for cognitive psychology in general.

The CABB dataset: A multimodal corpus of communicative interactions for behavioural and neural analyses

We present a dataset of behavioural and fMRI observations acquired in the context of humans involved in multimodal referential communication. The dataset contains audio/video and motion-tracking recordings of face-to-face, task-based communicative interactions in Dutch, as well as behavioural and neural correlates of participants' representations of dialogue referents. Seventy-one pairs of unacquainted participants performed two interleaved interactional tasks in which they described and located 16 novel geometrical objects (i.e., Fribbles) yielding spontaneous interactions of about one hour. We share high-quality video (from three cameras), audio (from head-mounted microphones), and motion-tracking (Kinect) data, as well as speech transcripts of the interactions. Before and after engaging in the face-to-face communicative interactions, participants' individual representations of the 16 Fribbles were estimated. Behaviourally, participants provided a written description (one to three words) for each Fribble and positioned them along 29 independent conceptual dimensions (e.g., rounded, human, audible). Neurally, fMRI signal evoked by each Fribble was measured during a one-back working-memory task. To enable functional hyperalignment across participants, the dataset also includes fMRI measurements obtained during visual presentation of eight animated movies (35 min total). We present analyses for the various types of data demonstrating their quality and consistency with earlier research. Besides high-resolution multimodal interactional data, this dataset includes different correlates of communicative referents, obtained before and after face-to-face dialogue, allowing for novel investigations into the relation between communicative behaviours and the representational space shared by communicators. This unique combination of data can be used for research in neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and beyond.

Parkinson's disease impacts feedback production during verbal communication

BACKGROUND

Parkinson's disease (PD) leads to changes in verbal communications. The focus of most studies to date has been on speech impairment, which is specifically referred to as dysarthria. Although these studies are crucial to understanding the impact of PD on verbal communication, they do not focus on the features of dialogues between people with PD (PwPD) and other people in communicative contexts.

AIMS

To investigate whether PwPD produce less feedback than typical people during dialogue, thus potentially making it more difficult for them to reach mutual comprehension (i.e., common ground) with their conversational partner.

METHODS & PROCEDURES

A matching task experiment was conducted during which an experimenter described abstract pictures to a participant, who was either a PwPD or a typical participant, so that he or she could organize these pictures in a grid. The participants could produce as much feedback as they liked.

OUTCOMES & RESULTS

PwPD were less likely to produce feedback than typical participants. This effect was mainly driven by two specific types of feedback: acknowledgment tokens and hesitations.

CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS

The results suggest that PD impacts feedback production. This could decrease the communicative abilities of PwPD in interactive contexts by affecting grounding, that is, the ability to build common ground with others. This paper is one of the first to specifically document the production of feedback markers in PwPD. Future studies should examine the extent to which our results, which were obtained in a controlled dialogue task, may be generalized to daily-life conversions. From a clinical perspective, our study points to the necessity of assessing feedback production, and more generally abilities related to common ground construction and use, during PD progression.

WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT

A few studies to date have analyzed conversational interactions between people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD) and others. The main focus is usually on potential difficulties of PwPD and their partners during the interaction and the strategies adopted to "repair" these problems. Another important feature of any interaction is the production of feedback. Feedback production plays a key role in building and using common ground to ensure mutual comprehension between interlocutors. The impact of Parkinson's disease on feedback production has received little attention in the literature to date.

WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS

The purpose of this study was to compare feedback production in a dialogue task (i.e., goal-oriented interaction) in PwPD versus typical controls. Our results revealed that PwPD produced less feedback for their dialogue partners than did typical participants. This effect was mainly driven by two specific types of feedback: acknowledgment tokens and hesitations. This paper is one of the firsts to specifically document the production of feedback markers in PwPD and to illustrate that PwPD and their dialogue partners may require more time and effort to establish common ground.

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THIS STUDY

Our findings suggest that an appropriate evaluation of feedback production by speech and language therapists, as well the management of potential deficits, would be beneficial. More broadly, we believe that the evaluation and management of PwPD should take into account the theoretical framework used in this study, in particular the role of common ground in communication.

Forgotten Little Words: How Backchannels and Particles May Facilitate Speech Planning in Conversation?

In everyday conversation, turns often follow each other immediately or overlap in time. It has been proposed that speakers achieve this tight temporal coordination between their turns by engaging in linguistic dual-tasking, i.e., by beginning to plan their utterance during the preceding turn. This raises the question of how speakers manage to co-ordinate speech planning and listening with each other. Experimental work addressing this issue has mostly concerned the capacity demands and interference arising when speakers retrieve some content words while listening to others. However, many contributions to conversations are not content words, but backchannels, such as “hm”. Backchannels do not provide much conceptual content and are therefore easy to plan and respond to. To estimate how much they might facilitate speech planning in conversation, we determined their frequency in a Dutch and a German corpus of conversational speech. We found that 19% of the contributions in the Dutch corpus, and 16% of contributions in the German corpus were backchannels. In addition, many turns began with fillers or particles, most often translation equivalents of “yes” or “no,” which are likewise easy to plan. We proposed that to generate comprehensive models of using language in conversation psycholinguists should study not only the generation and processing of content words, as is commonly done, but also consider backchannels, fillers, and particles.

A person living with dementia learning to navigate an iPad: a case study

PURPOSE

This study challenges the notion that people living with dementia are unable to achieve novel learning without focussed intervention techniques. The purpose of this study is to explore how a woman living with dementia (Alzheimer's disease) learns to use a tablet computer with support from communicative partners.

METHOD

The study is based on video recordings and the theoretical framework of learning as changing participation in joint activities. Quantitative and qualitative focus is on changes in the interactional organization over the course of six weeks in the activity of using an augmentative and alternative communication application.

RESULTS

Over time, the participant living with dementia, relies less on the expertise and explicit instructions of her communicative partners when navigating the application, and more on the immediate feedback provided by the tablet computer.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings suggest that novel learning still is possible for people living with dementia, even without the implementation of focussed interventions. This study further emphasizes the procedural nature of learning for people living with dementia as the woman's embodied actions were carried out in an increasingly more direct fashion.Implications for rehabilitationFor people living with dementia, learning in everyday activities is facilitated by repeated exposure to the activity and the scaffolding practices of a more experienced communicative partner.In instances of novel learning, one should not underestimate the importance of embodied engagement from people living dementia.Care professionals need not to worry about exposing people living with dementia to unfamiliar activities.