Anne H. Anderson

Face-to-face and video-mediated communication: A comparison of dialogue structure and task performance

This article examined communication and task performance in face-to-face, copresent, and video-mediated communication (VMC). Study 1 showed that when participants in a collaborative problem-solving task could both see and hear each other, the structure of their dialogues differed compared with dialogues obtained when they only heard each other. The audio-only conversations had more words, and these extra utterances often provided and elicited verbal feedback functions, which visual signals can deliver when available. Study 2, however, showed that high-quality VMC did not appear to deliver the same benefits as face-to-face, copresent interaction. It appears that novelty, attenuation, and remoteness all may have contributed to the effects found factors that should be considered by designers of remote video-conferencing systems.

The Effects of Visibility on Dialogue and Performance in a Cooperative Problem Solving Task

This study compares task outcome and various dialogue parameters between situations in which task participants either could or could not see each other. The results establish that the visibility of ones conversational partner improves information transfer and the management of turn taking in a transactional problem solving task. The greater efficiency of the dialogues between participants who could see each other was attributed to the exchange of visually transmitted, non-verbal signals. attempting to compensate for the lack of this additional channel of communication, pairs of subjects who could not see each other demonstrated flexibility and versatility in communicating. They interrupted their partners more frequently and used more back channel responses to provide their partners with increased verbal feedback. The analysis of one specific non-verbal behaviour, gaze, for a subsample of the dialogues, suggested that gaze plays a role in aiding communication.

The unintelligibility of speech to children: effects of referent availability

Speech addressed to children is supposed to be helpfully redundant, but redundant or predictable words addressed to adults tend to lose intelligibility. Word tokens extracted from the spontaneous speech of the parents of 12 children aged 1; 10 to 3; 0 and presented in isolation to adult listeners showed loss of intelligibility when the words were redundant because they had occurred in repetitions of an utterance (Experiment 1) or referred to an entity which was physically present when named (Experiment 2). Though children (N = 64; mean age 3; 5, S.D. 6.1 months) recognized fewer excerpted object names than adults (N = 40), less intelligible tokens appeared to induce child listeners to rely on the words extra-linguistic context during the recognition process (Experiment 3), much as such tokens normally induce adults to rely on discourse context. It is proposed that interpreting parental utterances with reference to non-verbal context furthers linguistic development.

Limited visual control of the intelligibility of speech in face-to-face dialogue

Speakers are thought to articulate individual words in running speech less carefully whenever additional nonacoustic information can help listeners recognize what is said (Fowler & Housum, 1987; Lieberman, 1963). Comparing single words excerpted from spontaneous dialogues and control tokens of the same words read by the same speakers in lists, Experiment 1 yielded a significant but general effect of visual context: Tokens introducing 71 new entities in dialogues in which participants could see one another’s faces were more degraded (less intelligible to 54 naive listeners) than were tokens of the same words from dialogues with sight lines blocked. Loss of clarity was not keyed to momentto-moment visual behavior. Subjects with clear sight lines looked at each other too rarely to account for the observed effect. Experiment 2 revealed that tokens of 60 words uttered while subjects were looking at each other were significantly less degraded (in length and in intelligibility to 72 subjects) vis-à-vis controls than were spontaneous tokens of the same words produced when subjects were looking elsewhere. Intelligibility loss was mitigated only when listeners looked at speakers. Two separate visual effects are discussed, one of the global availability and the other of the local use of the interlocutor’s face.

The HCRC Map Task corpus: natural dialogue for speech recognition

The HCRC Map Task corpus has been collected and transcribed in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and recently published on CD-ROM. This effort was made possible by funding from the British Economic and Social Research Council.The corpus is composed of 128 two-person conversations in both high-quality digital audio and orthographic transcriptions, amounting to 18 hours and 150,000 words respectively.The experimental design is quite detailed and complex, allowing a number of different phonemic, syntactico-semantic and pragmatic contrasts to be explored in a controlled way.The corpus is a uniquely valuable resource for speech recognition research in particular, as we move from developing systems intended for controlled use by familiar users to systems intended for less constrained circumstances and naive or occasional users. Examples supporting this claim are given, including preliminary evidence of the phonetic consequences of second mention and the impact of different styles of referent negotiation on communicative efficacy.

Forms of Introduction in Dialogues: Their Discourse Contexts and Communicative Consequences.

Abstract For effective communication to occur, speakers must share enough knowledge to understand one anothers contributions-they must achieve “mutual knowledge”. A critical point in a dialogue is therefore when one speaker wishes to introduce a new item. Previous research has shown how speakers collaborate to achieve mutual knowledge at points in a diaglogue. In this paper, we show that speakers vary in how effectively they collaborate with their partners on a communicative task. We demonstrate that there are a number of different ways in which new information can be introduced and that the choices speakers make influence how successful such collaborations are likely to be. Speakers who use question form introductions are more likely to elicit informative feedback from their partners and to communicate successfully.

Hearer-effects on speaker performances: the influence of the hearer on speakers' effectiveness in oral communication tasks

Experiments were conducted to investigate the oral communication skills of 14 to 16-year-olds and to discover conditions which elicit the best spoken performances. Several conditions were tested, using instructional tasks of different levels of difficulty with speakers of various academic abilities. The performances were scored objectively, using as a criterion the amount of relevant information included by speakers in their instructions. The presence of a hearer and ex periencing of the tasks in ascending order of difficulty both resulted in better spoken performances. Prior experience in the hearers role proved particularly beneficial in sensitizing speakers to their hearers information requirements. From these results simple training tech niques are outlined for eliciting competent spoken performances in schools.

Swings and roundabouts in parental speech: the effect of repetition and referent location on word intelligibility

the object referred to; it is used volitionally when the speaker wants to request an object that s/he does not possess but would like to, and to claim or maintain possession of an object s/he believes is his/her own. The results show that during phase I III both children expressed the indicative function of possessive constructions by using their own name when they referred to self as possessor. In contrast, they employed the pronominal form when the volitional function of requesting or maintaining possession of some possessum (often a toy) was involved. Thus, both children constructed a form-function relationship that does not exist in the target language they are acquiring, and they continued to use their own rational construction over a fairly long period of time in a systematic and predictable way. During phase IV the nominal form drops out and at the same time the pronominal form is

Approaches to Discourse

In this book the author aims to clarify several theories and methods of discourse analysis in ways which are useful to researchers in a wide range of cognate disciplines, from linguistics to sociology, anthropology to.psychology. Discourse analysis is an important but ill-defined area of study and this book is a useful attempt to illuminate the field by precise and orderly comparisons of six major approaches to analysing spoken interactions. The main part of the book is a detailed description, application and comparison of the different approaches to discourse analysis which have arisen from the work of scholars with very different academic backgrounds and concerns. These are speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversational analysis and variation analysis.