Quantifying the interplay of conversational devices in building mutual understanding.

2022/12/15 by Christina Dideriksen, Morten H. Christiansen, Kristian Tylén +2 · 1 voice · 62 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · #Cognitive psychology #Cognitive science #Communication #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistics #Psychology #Speech and dialogue systems

paper · open access · doi:10.1037/xge0001301

published in Journal of Experimental Psychology General 152(3), 864-889 (American Psychological Association)

openalex publication_date 2022/12/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Citations

• Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue
• The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation

Cited by

• Conversational alignment as an individual difference
• Scaffolding Early Dialogue: A Unified Account of Response Contingency in Child–Caregiver Interaction
• The Mechanistic Framework of Alignment: A Unified Model
• Tracking minds in communication
• Words as social tools (WAT): A reprise
• A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of the development of turn taking in adult–child vocal interactions
• Social Context Matters for Turn‐Taking Dynamics: A Comparative Study of Autistic and Typically Developing Children
• The Social Route to Abstraction: Interaction and Diversity Enhance Performance and Transfer in a Rule‐Based Categorization Task
• Caregiver linguistic alignment to autistic and typically developing children: A natural language processing approach illuminates the interactive components of language development
• Fine-tuning social timing: From non-human to human animals and back

Discussions

• Across several studies (doi.org/10.1037/xge0...) we have shown that different contextual demands (getting to know each other vs. negotiating how to reach a place) induce different conversational strat [bsky, 9 points, 1 comments]

Related

• Quantifying the interplay of conversational devices in building mutual understanding
• How Reliable Are Multimodal Signals of Conversational State? Evidence from Remote Dyadic Collaborative Tasks
• Neural Conversation Models and How to Rein Them in: A Survey of Failures and Fixes
• Advancing an Interdisciplinary Science of Conversation: Insights from a Large Multimodal Corpus of Human Speech
• Talk Less, Interact Better: Evaluating In-context Conversational Adaptation in Multimodal LLMs