Introducing objects in spoken dialogue: The influence of conversational setting and cognitive load on the articulation and use of referring expressions

Abstract

In this paper we report the results of a study to investigate the influence of conversational setting and cognitive load (as implemented by time pressure) on the introduction of new information in two-party spontaneous dialogues. We show that for a collaborative problem-solving task, The Map Task, cognitive load and conversational setting influenced the way interlocutors collaborated with one another when introducing objects into a discourse. Interlocutors used fewer question-form introductions followed by an informative response in a video-mediated conversational setting (compared with a face-to-face setting), and under time pressure (compared with no pressure of time). In contrast, speakers tended to articulate words referring to the same object more quickly on repetition irrespective of the conversational setting or the cognitive load associated with the task. The findings of this study are interpreted in terms of a dual-process account of speech production (Bard et al., 2000).

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Professor Simon Garrod for his comments and suggestions in relation to the work presented in this paper.

This work was funded by a University of Glasgow Studentship.