On incrementality in dialogue: Evidence from compound contributions

Abstract:

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 organisation of turn-taking and for the development of a shared context.

Research areas:

Year:

2011

Type of Publication:

Article

Journal:

Dialogue and Discourse

Volume:

2

Number:

1

Pages:

279-311

ISSN:

2152-9620

Paper Digital version [Bibtex]

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