A modified procedure for naming 332 pictures and collecting norms: Using tangram pictures in psycholinguistic studies.

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Furthermore, norms for concreteness were also provided owing to the influence of this variable on the processes involved in lexical production. Correlational analyses on all variables were performed on the data collected from French native speakers. This new set of standardized pictures constitutes a reliable database for researchers when they select tangram pictures. Given the abstract nature of tangram pictures, this paper also discusses the similarities and differences with the literature on line drawings, and highlights their value for dialogue psychology studies, for psycholinguistics studies, and for cognitive psychology in general.

Parkinson's disease impacts feedback production during verbal communication.

BACKGROUND: Parkinson's disease (PD) leads to changes in verbal communications. The focus of most studies to date has been on speech impairment, which is specifically referred to as dysarthria. Although these studies are crucial to understanding the impact of PD on verbal communication, they do not focus on the features of dialogues between people with PD (PwPD) and other people in communicative contexts. AIMS: To investigate whether PwPD produce less feedback than typical people during dialogue, thus potentially making it more difficult for them to reach mutual comprehension (i.e., common ground) with their conversational partner. METHODS & PROCEDURES: A matching task experiment was conducted during which an experimenter described abstract pictures to a participant, who was either a PwPD or a typical participant, so that he or she could organize these pictures in a grid. The participants could produce as much feedback as they liked. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: PwPD were less likely to produce feedback than typical participants. This effect was mainly driven by two specific types of feedback: acknowledgment tokens and hesitations. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The results suggest that PD impacts feedback production. This could decrease the communicative abilities of PwPD in interactive contexts by affecting grounding, that is, the ability to build common ground with others. This paper is one of the first to specifically document the production of feedback markers in PwPD. Future studies should examine the extent to which our results, which were obtained in a controlled dialogue task, may be generalized to daily-life conversions. From a clinical perspective, our study points to the necessity of assessing feedback production, and more generally abilities related to common ground construction and use, during PD progression. WHAT IS ALREADY KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT: A few studies to date have analyzed conversational interactions between people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD) and others. The main focus is usually on potential difficulties of PwPD and their partners during the interaction and the strategies adopted to "repair" these problems. Another important feature of any interaction is the production of feedback. Feedback production plays a key role in building and using common ground to ensure mutual comprehension between interlocutors. The impact of Parkinson's disease on feedback production has received little attention in the literature to date. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS: The purpose of this study was to compare feedback production in a dialogue task (i.e., goal-oriented interaction) in PwPD versus typical controls. Our results revealed that PwPD produced less feedback for their dialogue partners than did typical participants. This effect was mainly driven by two specific types of feedback: acknowledgment tokens and hesitations. This paper is one of the firsts to specifically document the production of feedback markers in PwPD and to illustrate that PwPD and their dialogue partners may require more time and effort to establish common ground. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THIS STUDY: Our findings suggest that an appropriate evaluation of feedback production by speech and language therapists, as well the management of potential deficits, would be beneficial. More broadly, we believe that the evaluation and management of PwPD should take into account the theoretical framework used in this study, in particular the role of common ground in communication.

The influence of conceptual (mis)match on collaborative referring in dialogue.

When two dialogue partners need to refer to something, they jointly negotiate which referring expression should be used. If needed, the chosen referring expression is then reused throughout the interaction, which potentially has a direct, positive impact on subsequent communication. The purpose of this study was to determine if the way in which the partners view, or conceptualise, the referent under discussion, affects referring expression negotiation and subsequent communication. A matching task was preceded by an individual task during which participants were required to describe their conceptualisations of abstract tangram pictures. The results revealed that participants found it more difficult to converge on single referring expression during the matching task when they initially held different conceptualisations of the pictures. This had a negative impact on the remainder of the task. These findings are discussed in light of the shared versus mutual knowledge distinction, highlighting how the former directly contributes to the formation of the latter.

Direct and indirect linguistic measures of common ground in dialogue studies involving a matching task: A systematic review.

During dialogue, speakers attempt to adapt messages to their addressee appropriately by taking into consideration their common ground (i.e., all the information mutually known by the conversational partners) to ensure successful communication. Knowing and remembering what information is part of the common ground shared with a given partner and using it during dialogue are crucial skills for social interaction. It is therefore important to better understand how we can measure the use of common ground and to identify the potential associated psychological processes. In this context, a systematic review of the literature was performed to list the linguistic measures of common ground found in dialogue studies involving a matching task and to explore any evidence of cognitive and social mechanisms underlying common ground use in this specific experimental setting, particularly in normal aging and in neuropsychological studies. Out of the 23 articles included in this review, we found seven different linguistic measures of common ground that were classified as either a direct measure of common ground (i.e., measures directly performed on the referential content) or an indirect measure of common ground (i.e., measures assessing the general form of the discourse). This review supports the idea that both types of measures should systematically be used while assessing common ground because they may reflect different concepts underpinned by distinct psychological processes. Given the lack of evidence for the implication of other cognitive and social functions in common ground use in studies involving matching tasks, future research is warranted, particularly in the clinical field.

How awareness of each other's mental load affects dialogue.

During dialogue, people reach mutual comprehension through the production of feedback markers such as "yeah" or "okay." The purpose of the current study was to determine if mental load affects feedback production, as there is currently no consensus as to how mental load constrains the way in which dialogue partners reach mutual comprehension. In two experiments, pairs of participants interacted in order to complete a collaborative puzzle game. We manipulated the amount of mental load experienced by each participant by giving them a series of digits to memorize (or no digits) before the beginning of the game. In Experiment 1, the participants were given no information about their partner's mental load. In Experiment 2, each participant was told whether their partner had received digits to memorize. We found that although some results were identical in both experiments (directors produced more words, longer utterances, and fewer feedback markers than matchers), the effect of mental load was different in both experiments. Indeed, whereas in Experiment 1, mental load mainly affected the number of words and speech turns produced, in Experiment 2, participants who had to follow the instructions of their partner and were under low mental load produced more feedback markers when their partner was under high mental load. Taken together, these results help disentangle the contribution of experienced and perceived mental load on collaboration in dialogue. They also highlight the importance of being explicitly aware of each other's mental load in interpersonal coordination. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

When non-salient information becomes salient in conversational memory: Collaboration shapes the effects of emotion and self-production.

People's memory of what was said and who said what during dialogue plays a central role in mutual comprehension and subsequent adaptation. This article outlines that well-established effects in conversational memory such as the self-production and the emotional effects actually depend on the nature of the interaction. We specifically focus on the impact of the collaborative nature of the interaction, comparing participants' conversational memory in non-collaborative and collaborative interactive settings involving interactions between two people (i.e., dialogue). The findings reveal that the amplitude of these conversational memory effects depends on the collaborative vs. non-collaborative nature of the interaction. The effects are attenuated when people have the opportunity to collaborate because information that remained non-salient in the non-collaborative condition (neutral and partner-produced words) became salient in the collaborative condition to a level similar to otherwise salient information (emotional and self-produced words). We highlight the importance of these findings in the study of dialogue and conversational memory.

Comparing individual and collective management of referential choices in dialogue.

Past research shows that when a discourse referent is mentioned repeatedly, it is usually introduced with a full noun phrase and maintained with a reduced form such as a pronoun. Is this also the case in dialogue, where the same referent may be introduced by one person and maintained by another person? An experiment was conducted in which participants either told entire stories to each other or told stories together, thus enabling us to contrast situations in which characters were introduced and maintained by the same person (control condition) and situations in which the introduction and the maintaining of each character were performed by different people (alternating condition). Story complexity was also manipulated through the introduction of one or two characters in each story. We found that participants were less likely to use reduced forms to maintain referents in the alternating condition. The use of reduced forms also depended on the context in which the referent was maintained (in particular, first or second mention of a character) and on story complexity. These results shed light on how the pressure to signal understanding to one's conversational partner affects referential choices throughout the interaction.

Cultural transmission in a food preparation task: The role of interactivity, innovation and storytelling.

Interactive conversation drives the transmission of cultural information in small groups and large networks. In formal (e.g. schools) and informal (e.g. home) learning settings, interactivity does not only allow individuals and groups to faithfully transmit and learn new knowledge and skills, but also to boost cumulative cultural evolution. Here we investigate how interactivity affects performance, teaching, learning, innovation and chosen diffusion mode (e.g. instructional discourse vs. storytelling) of previously acquired information in a transmission chain experiment. In our experiment, participants (n = 288) working in 48 chains with three generations of pairs had to learn and complete a collaborative food preparation task (ravioli-making), and then transmit their experience to a new generation of participants in an interactive and non-interactive condition. Food preparation is a real-world task that it is taught and learned across cultures and transmitted over generations in families and groups. Pairs were defined as teachers or learners depending on their role in the transmission chain. The number of good exemplars of ravioli each pair produced was taken as measurement of performance. Contrary to our expectations, the results did not reveal that (1) performance increased over generations or that (2) interactivity in transmission sessions promoted increased performance. However, the results showed that (3) interactivity promoted the transmission of more information from teachers to learners; (4) increased quantity of information transmission from teachers led to higher performance in learners; (5) higher performance generations introduced more innovations in transmission sessions; (6) learners applied those transmitted innovations to their performance which made them persist over generations; (7) storytelling was specialized for the transmission of non-routine, unexpected information. Our findings offer new insights on how interactivity, innovation and storytelling affect the cultural transmission of complex collaborative tasks.

I remember emotional content better, but I'm struggling to remember who said it!

The joint impact of emotion and production on conversational memory was examined in two experiments where pairs of participants took turns producing verbal information. They were instructed to produce out loud sentences based on either neutral or emotional (Experiment 1: negative; Experiment 2: positive) words. Each participant was then asked to recall as many words as possible (content memory) and to indicate who had produced each word (reality monitoring). The analyses showed that both self-production and emotion boost content memory, although emotion also impairs reality monitoring. This study sheds light on how both factors (emotion and production) may constrain language interaction memory through information saliency.

Conceptual match as a determinant of reference reuse in dialogue.

As speakers interact, they add references to their common ground, which they can then reuse to facilitate listener comprehension. However, all references are not equally likely to be reused. The purpose of this study was to shed light on how the speakers' conceptualizations of the referents under discussion affect reuse (along with a generation effect in memory documented in previous studies on dialogic reuse). Two experiments were conducted in which participants interactively added references to their common ground. From each participant's point of view, these references either did or did not match their own conceptualization of the referents discussed, and were either self- or partner-generated. Although self-generated references were more readily accessible in memory than partner-generated ones (Experiment 1), reference reuse was mainly guided by conceptualization (Experiment 2). These results are in line with the idea that several different cues (conceptual match, memory accessibility) constrain reference reuse in dialogue. (PsycINFO Database Record

Generating References in Naturalistic Face-to-Face and Phone-Mediated Dialog Settings.

During dialog, references are presented, accepted, and potentially reused (depending on their accessibility in memory). Two experiments were conducted to examine reuse in a naturalistic setting (a walk in a familiar environment). In Experiment 1, where the participants interacted face to face, self-presented references and references accepted through verbatim repetition were reused more. Such biases persisted after the end of the interaction. In Experiment 2, where the participants interacted over the phone, reference reuse mainly depended on whether the participant could see the landmarks being referred to, although this bias seemed to be only transient. Consistent with the memory-based approach to dialog, these results shed light on how differences in accessibility in memory (due to how these references were initially added to the common ground or the media used) affect the unfolding of the interaction.

The influence of reference acceptance and reuse on conversational memory traces.

Not all pieces of information mentioned during an interaction are equally accessible in speakers' conversational memory. The current study sought to test whether 2 basic features of dialogue management (reference acceptance and reuse) affect reference recognition. Dyads of speakers were asked to discuss a route for an imaginary person, thus referring to the landmarks to be encountered. The results revealed that the participants' conversational memory for the references produced during the interaction depended on whether these had been reused during the interaction and by whom, along with landmark visibility during the interaction. These findings have implications for partner adaptation in dialogue, which depends in part on what speakers remember of past interactions.

Capturing egocentric biases in reference reuse during collaborative dialogue.

Words that are produced aloud--and especially self-produced ones--are remembered better than words that are not, a phenomenon labeled the production effect in the field of memory research. Two experiments were conducted to determine whether this effect can be generalized to dialogue, and how it might affect dialogue management. Triads (Exp. 1) or dyads (Exp. 2) of participants interacted to perform a collaborative task. Analyzing reference reuse during the interaction revealed that the participants were more likely to reuse the references that they had presented themselves, on the one hand, and those that had been accepted through verbatim repetition, on the other. Analyzing reference recall suggested that the greater accessibility of self-presented references was only transient. Moreover, among partner-presented references, those discussed while the participant had actively taken part in the conversation were more likely to be recalled than those discussed while the participant had been inactive. These results contribute to a better understanding of how individual memory processes might contribute to collaborative dialogue.