When interlocutors repeatedly describe referents to each other, they rapidly converge on referring expressions which become increasingly systematized and abstract as the interaction progresses. Previous experimental research suggests that interactive repair mechanisms in dialogue underpin convergence. However, this research has so far only focused on the role of other-initiated repair and has not examined whether self-initiated repair might also play a role. To investigate this question, we report the results from a computer-mediated maze task experiment. In this task, participants communicate (...) with each other via an experimental chat tool, which selectively transforms participants’ private turn-revisions into public self-repairs that are made visible to the other participant. For example, if a participant, A, types “On the top square,” and then before sending, A revises the turn to “On the top row,” the server automatically detects the revision and transforms the private turn-revisions into a public self-repair, for example, “On the top square umm I meant row.” Participants who received these transformed turns used more abstract and systematized referring expressions, but performed worse at the task. We argue that this is due to the artificial self-repairs causing participants to put more effort into diagnosing and resolving the referential coordination problems they face in the task, yielding better grounded spatial semantics and consequently increased use of abstract referring expressions. (shrink)

Feedback such as backchannels and clarification requests often occurs subsententially, demonstrating the incremental nature of grounding in dialogue. However, although such feedback can occur at any point within an utterance, it typically does not do so, tending to occur at Feedback Relevance Spaces. We present a corpus study of acknowledgements and clarification requests in British English, and describe how our low-level, semantic processing model in Dynamic Syntax accounts for this feedback. The model trivially accounts for the 85% of cases where (...) feedback occurs at FRSs, but we also describe how it can be integrated or interpreted at non-FRSs using the predictive, incremental and interactive nature of the formalism. This model shows how feedback serves to continually realign processing contexts and thus manage the characteristic divergence and convergence that is key to moving dialogue forward. (shrink)

Healey et al. use experiments with chat dialogues to test the hypothesis that language co‐ordination is driven by ‘running repairs’. They replace signals of understanding such as “okay” with weaker, ‘spoof’ signals like “ummm”, and replace specific requests for clarification like “on the left?” with signals that suggest a higher degree of misunderstanding like “what?”. The latter manipulation causes participants to switch rapidly to more abstract forms of referring expression.