In the second talk of the week, Gregory Mills (http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/gmills/) will talk about “Clarifying intentions in dialogue – how miscommunication drives alignment”. Friday 12th April, 4pm, DSB 3.10, abstract below.

Gregory Mills

Clarifying intentions in dialogue – how miscommunication drives alignment

One of the most contentious debates in studies of dialogue concerns the explanatory role assigned to speakers‘ intentions.  To address this  issue, this talk reports a computer-mediated variant of  the  maze task (Pickering & Garrod, 2004; Mills and Healey 2006), which manipulates the dialogue by inserting artificial clarification requests that appear, to participants, as if they originate from each other. Two kinds of clarification were introduced: (1) Artificial “Why?” questions that query intentions associated with the  plan, (2) Fragment clarification requests that that repeat a single word from the prior turn, querying the content of participants’ referring expressions. As coordination develops, “Why?” clarification requests become progressively easier to respond to, while for fragment clarification requests the converse is the case. Further, fragment clarification requests leads to interlocutors aligning quicker on more abstract and systematic referring expressions. This talk argues that this differential pattern is not arrived at via explicit negotiation of intentions, but through the tacit turn-by-turn feedback mechanisms of dialogue.

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