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The shared knowledge, beliefs and assumptions that interlocutors bring to their exchanges can be extremely varied. It may be based on extensive interpersonal history, or on very little; on detailed knowledge of individual interlocutors, or on stereotypes or general encyclopaedic knowledge. In conversation with strangers, stereotypes and general encyclopaedic knowledge naturally dominate, but

communication may be no less effective for that. Thus, for example, Bostonians who in a 1968 study were asked, ‘I’m from out of town, can you tell me how to get to Jordan Marsh’, replied more fully – and presumably more helpfully – than those who were simply asked, ‘Can you tell me how to get to Jordan Marsh?’ (Kingsbury 1968, quoted by Krauss & Pardo, 2004: 203). Nor did the ‘I am a stranger’ message have to be explicitly communicated; Bostonians asked simply ‘Can you tell me how to get to Jordan Marsh?’ replied in greater detail if it had been asked in a non-local dialect.

Even such brief exchanges as these demonstrate that an obvious, but entirely fundamental, prerequisite for communication success is monitoring: not only the self-monitoring posited by unilateral accounts of speech production such as Levelt’s, but the monitoring by one interlocutor of another, and of the world around them. As Clark and others have shown, such monitoring is carried out continually, and draws on signals from a variety of sources: voices, faces (especially eye gaze), bodies, the proximal environment (e.g. the interlocutors’ joint workspaces), and the distal environment (e.g. a scene both interlocutors are watching). As I will show below, there is also evidence that the nature of the interaction dictates which of these sources take priority, revealing both the precision and the flexibility that Speakers bring to their role.

A detailed example of interaction between a physical situation and the

communication that takes place in (and about) it is offered by Clark & Krych’s (2004) workspace study. The procedure here follows a broadly similar protocol to the Schober & Clark experiments: participants are grouped in pairs – ‘directors’ and ‘builders’ – and directors are asked to tell builders how to construct 10 simple Lego models. The pairs work under four different sets of interactive conditions:

participants can/cannot see into the builder’s workspace (workspace visible vs

workspace hidden), and they can/cannot see each other’s faces (faces visible vs faces hidden). In a fifth, non-interactive, condition, directors merely record their

instructions and builders follow the recordings later.

The results show that participants complete their tasks more quickly when the workspace is visible than when it is hidden, and that they take longer, make more errors, or both, if the speakers cannot monitor their partners at all. When participants can see into the builder’s workspace, mean building times are ‘much shorter’. Conversely, where builders have only pre-recorded directions to follow, they have major difficulties: ‘When monitoring was precluded, builders made eight times as many model errors [where the constructed model did not completely match its prototype] and 14 times as many block errors [where a Lego block was the wrong colour, size, or in the wrong place]… The most accurate pair in the non-interactive condition was only as good as the least accurate pair in the interactive condition’ (Clark & Krych, 2004: 69).

In this case, monitoring each other’s faces does not make any significant difference to the results, an interesting outcome that Clark & Krych ascribe to the fact that the interaction is task-oriented. ‘Although people do make use of eye-gaze and head gestures when visible,’ they conclude, ‘… this did not lead to measurably greater efficiency in our task. Monitoring the addressee’s workspaces, on the other hand, is critical, and in our task, preventing it doubled the time needed. And preventing all monitoring of others led to eight times as many errors’ (ibid: 76).

Participants’ grounding techniques that account for these ‘dramatic’ differences in outcome include visual monitoring (mainly by directors), gesturing (particularly by builders, querying whether they have understood a director correctly), building

actions, and building ‘postponements’ where, say, a builder hesitantly holds a block over the model. In this last case, Clark & Krych say, ‘builders appeared to use these to signal that they had too little information to proceed, and in every case, directors responded with more information’ (ibid: 72). Meanwhile, as grounding theory predicts, both interlocutors show themselves skilled opportunists in their Speaker role, changing course in mid-speech to take advantage of openings offered by the Hearer’s gestural acts and other visible actions and, typically, initiating such changes within half a second of the opportunities becoming available.

In another task-based example, by Kraut et al (2003), a similar pattern of sensitivity to the interlocutor’s situation is demonstrated, but observed in terms of specifically linguistic performance. Here, the task is to repair a bicycle, and one focus of the experiment is the extent to which interlocutors use deictic expressions to refer to tools and other work objects during their activities8. Each repair session is carried out by two people, a ‘helper’ who guides operations, and a ‘worker’, who executes them. The participants operate under three sets of conditions: working side-by-side, in each other’s physical presence; working in separate rooms, connected by an audio link; and working separately but connected by an audio-visual link. The results demonstrate that, in the side-by-side condition where participants can see both each other and the work objects, both use deixis frequently. In the audio condition, where helpers cannot see operations, neither interlocutor uses it. In the audio-visual

condition, however, this symmetry does not obtain. Summarising this result in 2004, Fussell & Kraut explain that ‘here, the helpers can see the workers and work space but cannot point to objects in it. Under these conditions, helpers rarely used deixis. However, workers can point to task objects and they know that helpers can see them do so through the video link. They use deixis instead of matching the helpers’ nondeictic expressions… In short, the way workers referred to task objects and locations depended upon what their partners could see, not the language their partners previously used to refer to these same objects and locations’ (Fussell & Kraut, 2004: 197).

In this experiment, it is the speakers who appraise their interlocutors’ physical situations and modify their utterances accordingly. But the reverse – the partner-

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E.g. ‘The derailleur is actually hanging down on this side… Right there’, as opposed to ‘The derailleur is hanging down by its cable… Off the left hand side of the bike’ (Kraut et al 2003: 37).

specific sensitivity of hearers – has also been observed in a shared task setting where, as noted by Brennan & Metzing (2004), addressees interpret the same utterance differently when it is spoken by different speakers with whom different dialogue histories are shared. In Metzing & Brennan’s experiments of 2001/3, the (confederate) Speaker tells an Addressee to reposition a large set of objects: a process that they complete several times, developing shared perspectives and terms for individual objects (e.g. the shiny cylinder). Metzing & Brennan propose that this lexical entrainment, or convergence on similar referring expressions, involves a ‘conceptual pact’ – a temporary, flexible agreement to view an object in a particular way (Metzing & Brennan 2003: 201). The Speaker then leaves the room and either returns or is replaced by a new Speaker, after which the repositioning task is undertaken for the last time:

In the final trial, the new or old speaker used either the familiar term or a new, equally good term (e.g. the silver pipe) for the same critical object (amid many other references that did not use different terms). Addressees gazed

immediately at the object when either speaker used the old term. However, when the old speaker used a new term (inexplicably breaking a conceptual pact), addressees experienced interference, delaying gazing at the target object. There was no such delay when the new speaker used the new term.

(Brennan & Metzing, 2004: 192)

This hesitation, they suggest, indicates that the representations in memory from which entrainment emerges encode a cue that is partner-specific, which leads addressees to expect that a speaker should continue to use agreed expressions where no contrasting meaning is implicated.9

Overall, as Brennan & Metzing conclude (ibid: 192), such immediate effects provide evidence of ‘impressive agility and potential for partner-specific processing in the language processing system’. And, notwithstanding the importance demonstrated above of visual monitoring during dialogue, evidence from dialogic situations where physical co-presence is by definition excluded also shows signs of such agility. For example, telephone interlocutors – deprived though these are of the visual cues that

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Relevance Theory would endorse this claim, though without appealing to ‘pacts’. When the old speaker uses a new term, he is causing the hearer gratuitous processing effort unless he means to achieve extra, or different effects – hence the need for the hearer to search for these, and the delay in his reaction. In contrast, when a new speaker uses the same term, any extra effort that it placed on the hearer would be seen as accidental, and therefore no search for additional effects would take place.

participants in practical tasks find vital – nonetheless interact effectively through the systematic use of techniques such as back-channels (e.g. Okay, All right, Uh-huh). Results of research by Bangerter, Clark & Katz (2004) suggest that conversational ‘project markers’10 like these are employed in at least two distinct ways. The terms

Uh-huh, yeah, or right are typically used to respond to new contributions to the body

of a conversation, by acknowledging them or displaying agreement. In contrast,

okay and all right are used primarily to enter and exit projects, such as moving into

the body of a call or closing a side sequence. These words, they argue, are all

specialized components of a system of contrasts that enables interlocutors to navigate joint discourse projects: ‘Okay and all right are specialized for vertical navigation – entering and exiting joint projects. Yeah, uh-huh and right are specialized for horizontal navigation – continuing within joint projects’. (Bangerter et al, 2004: 20)

These and other detailed accounts of dialogic situations give abundant evidence of how complex, how speedy, and yet how apparently effortless for the Speaker is the process of inferring common ground, and thus adapting speech to the needs of a specific situation, audience, or Hearer. But the evidence, as well as providing answers to some questions, raises others. True, it gives some insights into the mechanisms whereby a Speaker and a Hearer succeed in ‘thinking about’ the same things as they pursue their interaction, but the issues of speed and flexibility are not directly addressed. Perhaps more serious still, consideration of these issues raises an additional problem, that of cognitive load. It appears that interlocutors who are continually mindful of their opposite numbers’ needs – and who are therefore successful communicators – have to deal with an enormous amount of data on a second-by-second basis. How do they do it? And, indeed, do they actually do it? It is at this point that the contribution made by Pickering & Garrod’s 2004 proposal for a ‘mechanistic psychology of dialogue’ needs to be assessed.

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Bangerter et al equate conversation with project-oriented action: ‘In conversation, the participants do not just speak – they do things together… To understand what people are doing in conversation, one must understand the joint activities [i.e. projects] they are engaged in’ (ibid: 1). Furthermore, the social encounter is itself a sequence of joint projects, such as ‘entry’, ‘body’ and ‘exit’.