Anticipating Distracted Addressees: How Speakers' Expectations and Addressees' Feedback Influence Storytelling

Abstract

To what extent are speakers' utterances shaped by their expectations of addressees' behavior, and to what extent are they shaped by the feedback they receive from addressees? In 39 pairs (32 men and 46 women), speakers told addressees 2 jokes. Addressees were either attentive or else distracted by a second task, and speakers expected addressees to be either attentive or distracted. Attentive addressees gave more feedback than distracted addressees. Speakers with attentive addressees told the jokes with more vivid details than those with distracted addressees, but only when they expected attentive addressees. Speakers with distracted addressees put less time into the task than did those with attentive addressees, but only when they did not expect them to be distracted. These results suggest that speakers' narrations are shaped not only by addressees' feedback, but also by how speakers construe a lack of feedback on the part of a distracted addressee.

Notes

^aTranscription follows conventions of the “Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem” (Selting et al., 1998): (-) = brief pauses; * = interrupted speech; capital letters = accentuation.

^bSquare brackets = index number of narrative element (see Appendix A); boldface type and [X]s = target coding category.