Transcript Psycholinguistics 09

Psycholinguistics 09
Conversational Interaction
Conversational Interaction
• Conversation is a complex process of
language use and a special form of social
interaction with its own rules and dynamics.
• Conversation is a joint action: two
participants jointly follow the rules.
• Conversation rules: with powerful influence
of social and cultural context.
Structure of Conversation
• Fillmore (1981): the language of face-toface conversation is the basic and primary
use of language, all others being best
described in terms of the derivation from
that base.
• Table-9-1 comparison of four forms of
discourse
Aspects of Turn Study
• Simultaneous turn vs. simultaneous talking
• Turn order
• Turn length—Jaffe (1970): the length of a
particular speaker’s turn was a stable
individual characteristic.
• Pause between vocalization matches the
pause of other participants. The net effect:
rhythm of the conversation.
Opening Conversation
• Scheglogg (1972): We have only a limited
number of ways to open a conversation.
• e.g. address another person and request or
offer information
• use stereotyped expressions or topics
• The opening conversation is to establish the
alternations of turns: ABABAB
Closing Conversation
• We use preclosing statement to signal a readiness
to end the conversation.
• Alber’s ways to end conversations (1978)
• ◎ summarizing the content of the conversation
• ◎ justifying ending contract at this time
• ◎ expressing pleasure about each other
• ◎ making reference to ongoing relationship
• ◎ wishing each other well
• These ways are used in the indicated order.
Taking Turns
• Turn taking follows three implicit rules.
• 1. The current speaker is allowed to select
the next speaker, often by directing a
question to another person.
• 2. Self-selection: If the first rule is not used,
another person will speak up.
• 3. The current speaker can continue.
Nonverbal Signals
• Nonverbal behavior also facilitates an orderly
transition from one speaker to another.
• Duncan (1972): six cues of turn-yielding
• 1. a drop of pitch
• 2. a drawl on the final syllable or final stressed
syllable of a final clause.
• 3. the termination of hand gestures
• 4. the use of stereotyped expressions such as you
know, or something.
• 5. a drop in loudness
• 6. completion of a grammatical clause
Cue and Listener’s Turn
• Relationship between the number of the
cues and the probability of the listener’s
attempt to take a turn.
• Cures
Probability
• 0
10%
3
33%
6
50%
Topics in Conversations
• Topics in conversation can be defined in terms of
the intersection of propositions across sentences.
• A: John bought a red car in Baltimore yesterday.
• Propositions: John bought a car.
• The car is red.
• John bought it in Baltimore.
• John bought it yesterday.
Topics in Conversations
• B can respond to any of these propositions.
• Only
conversations,
not
individual
sentences or even speaker turns, have topics.
• B can add a new topic while responding to
A’s proposition (You mean he’s not going to
buy my car?)
Topics in Conversations
• A has three options:
• 1. respond to the new topic directly: No, he
didn’t like your car.
• 2. refer back to that part of the original topic:
Well, John needed a car in a hurry.
• 3. make a more general response: It’s
always difficult to sell a car.
Conversational Participants
• Common ground: shared understanding of
those involved in the conversation. Some of
the common grounds is culturally based,
such as cultural values, commonly held
beliefs. Other types of common ground are
more personal.
Conversational Participants
• Planalp (1993): Friends were more likely to use
profanity, laugh more often, express negative
judgments, argue with one another and make joint
references to themselves (we, us). Acquaintances
were more likely to use filled pauses and talk
about only one topic.
• Homstein (1985): Friends used more implicit
openings, talk about more topics, asked more
questions, used more complex closings.
Acquaintances were generally similar to strangers.
Gender differences
• Zimmerman (1975):
• 96% of the interruptions were by male speakers.
• Many of the responses by males to female topics
were delayed minimal responses.
• Men deny equal status to women as conversational
partners with respect to the rights to the full
utilization of their turns and support for the
development of topics.
Gender differences
• Lakoff (1975)
• Women’s speech differs in a number of respects from
men’s speech: more linguistic expressions of
uncertainty. Women tend to use tag questions and
hedges (sort of, I guess). They also tend to use more
question intonation patterns in declarative sentences
than men.
• Fishman (1978): women used more questions,
attention-getting devices (this is interesting), and
minimal responses than men.
• More recent work has a somewhat different
explanation for the phenomena found.
Conversational Settings
• Personal setting: a free exchange of turns
takes place among the two or more
participants.
• Institutional setting: one participant is
considered the authority figure.
Therapeutic Discourse
• Three tasks during therapy
• 1. the therapist listens carefully as the client
reports experiences, issues, and concerns.
• 2. the therapists interprets the client’s
experiences and symptoms.
• 3. the therapist collaborates with the client
regarding potential courses of action.