Open AccessOn Incrementality in Dialogue: Evidence from Compound Contributions
Author(s) -
Christine Howes,
Matthew Purver,
Patrick G. T. Healey,
Gregory Mills,
Eleni Gregoromichelaki
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
dialogue and discourse
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.25
H-Index - 5
ISSN - 2152-9620
DOI - 10.5087/dad.2011.111
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , computer science , affect (linguistics) , resource (disambiguation) , word (group theory) , linguistics , cognitive psychology , mechanism (biology) , psychology , natural language processing , communication , epistemology , history , computer network , philosophy , archaeology
Spoken contributions in dialogue often continue or complete earlier contributions by either the same or a different speaker. These compound contributions (CCs) thus provide a natural context for investigations of incremental processing in dialogue.We present a corpus study which confirms that CCs are a key dialogue phenomenon: almost 20% of contributions fit our general definition of CCs, with nearly 3% being the cross-person case most often studied. The results suggest that processing is word-by-word incremental, as splits can occur within syntactic ‘constituents’; however, some systematic differences between same- and cross-person cases indicate important dialogue-specific pragmatic effects. An experimental study then investigates these effects by artificially introducing CCs into multi-party text dialogue. Results suggest that CCs affect people’s expectations about who will speak next and whether other participants have formed a coalition or ‘party’.Together, these studies suggest that CCs require an incremental processing mechanism that can provide a resource for constructing linguistic constituents that span multiple contributions and multiple participants. They also suggest the need to model higher-level dialogue units that have consequences for the organization of turn-taking and for the development of a shared context.