Establishing Goals and Maintaining Coherence in Multiparty Computer-Mediated Communication

Abstract

Communicating via text-only computer-mediated communication (CMC) channels is associated with a number of issues that would impair users in achieving dialogue coherence and goals. It has been suggested that humans have devised novel adaptive strategies to deal with those issues. However, it could be that humans rely on “classic” coherence devices too. In this study, we investigate whether relevancy markers, a subset of discourse markers, are relied on to assess dialogue coherence and goals. The results of two experiments showed that participants oriented systematically on the relevancy markers and that substitution of the original markers for other (dis)similar words affected eye movements and task performance. It appears that, despite the loosely connected dialogue contributions, the multiple concurrent dialogues, and the multiparty nature of text-only CMC dialogues, humans are able still to locate coherence- and goal-related information by relying on the presence of the relevancy markers.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Professor Iain Gilchrist, School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, for the loan of the eye tracker and to Dr. Adam Joinson and James Dove of the University of Bath for the excellent collaboration on this project and the provision of the corpora.