Language-Specific Constraints on Conversation: Evidence from Danish and Norwegian.

Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so, people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Here, we explore whether the use of conversational devices might be influenced by cross-linguistic differences in the speakers' native language, comparing two matched languages-Danish and Norwegian-differing primarily in their sound structure, with Danish being more opaque, that is, less acoustically distinguished. Across systematically manipulated conversational contexts, we find that processes supporting mutual understanding in conversations vary with external constraints: across different contexts and, crucially, across languages. In accord with our predictions, linguistic entrainment was overall higher in Danish than in Norwegian, while backchannels and repairs presented a more nuanced pattern. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that native speakers of Danish may compensate for its opaque sound structure by adopting a top-down strategy of building more conversational redundancy through entrainment, which also might reduce the need for repairs. These results suggest that linguistic differences might be met by systematic changes in language processing and use. This paves the way for further cross-linguistic investigations and critical assessment of the interplay between cultural and linguistic factors on the one hand and conversational dynamics on the other.

On the semiotic and material constraints of ideographies.

Despite obvious advantages, no generalised ideographic codes have evolved through cultural evolution to rely on iconicity. Morin suggests that this is because of missing means of standardisation, which glottographic codes get from natural languages. Although we agree, we also point to the important role of the available media, which might support some forms of reference more effectively than others.

The Social Route to Abstraction: Interaction and Diversity Enhance Performance and Transfer in a Rule-Based Categorization Task.

Capacities for abstract thinking and problem-solving are central to human cognition. Processes of abstraction allow the transfer of experiences and knowledge between contexts helping us make informed decisions in new or changing contexts. While we are often inclined to relate such reasoning capacities to individual minds and brains, they may in fact be contingent on human-specific modes of collaboration, dialogue, and shared attention. In an experimental study, we test the hypothesis that social interaction enhances cognitive processes of rule-induction, which in turn improves problem-solving performance. Through three sessions of increasing complexity, individuals and groups were presented with a problem-solving task requiring them to categorize a set of visual stimuli. To assess the character of participants' problem representations, after each training session, they were presented with a transfer task involving stimuli that differed in appearance, but shared relations among features with the training set. Besides, we compared participants' categorization behaviors to simulated agents relying on exemplar learning. We found that groups performed superior to individuals and agents in the training sessions and were more likely to correctly generalize their observations in the transfer phase, especially in the high complexity session, suggesting that groups more effectively induced underlying categorization rules from the stimuli than individuals and agents. Crucially, variation in performance among groups was predicted by semantic diversity in members' dialogical contributions, suggesting a link between social interaction, cognitive diversity, and abstraction.

The Dynamic Interplay of Kinetic and Linguistic Coordination in Danish and Norwegian Conversation.

In conversation, individuals work together to achieve communicative goals, complementing and aligning language and body with each other. An important emerging question is whether interlocutors entrain with one another equally across linguistic levels (e.g., lexical, syntactic, and semantic) and modalities (i.e., speech and gesture), or whether there are complementary patterns of behaviors, with some levels or modalities diverging and others converging in coordinated fashions. This study assesses how kinematic and linguistic entrainment interact with one another across levels of measurement, and according to communicative context. We analyzed data from two matched corpora of dyadic interaction between-respectively-Danish and Norwegian native speakers engaged in affiliative conversations and task-oriented conversations. We assessed linguistic entrainment at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic level, and kinetic alignment of the head and hands using video-based motion tracking and dynamic time warping. We tested whether-across the two languages-linguistic alignment correlates with kinetic alignment, and whether these kinetic-linguistic associations are modulated either by the type of conversation or by the language spoken. We found that kinetic entrainment was positively associated with low-level linguistic (i.e., lexical) entrainment, while negatively associated with high-level linguistic (i.e., semantic) entrainment, in a cross-linguistically robust way. Our findings suggest that conversation makes use of a dynamic coordination of similarity and complementarity both between individuals as well as between different communicative modalities, and provides evidence for a multimodal, interpersonal synergy account of interaction.

Quantifying the interplay of conversational devices in building mutual understanding.

Humans readily engage in idle chat and heated discussions and negotiate tough joint decisions without ever having to think twice about how to keep the conversation grounded in mutual understanding. However, current attempts at identifying and assessing the conversational devices that make this possible are fragmented across disciplines and investigate single devices within single contexts. We present a comprehensive conceptual framework to investigate conversational devices, their relations, and how they adjust to contextual demands. In two corpus studies, we systematically test the role of three conversational devices: backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Contrasting affiliative and task-oriented conversations within participants, we find that conversational devices adaptively adjust to the increased need for precision in the latter: We show that low-precision devices such as backchannels are more frequent in affiliative conversations, whereas more costly but higher-precision mechanisms, such as specific repairs, are more frequent in task-oriented conversations. Further, task-oriented conversations involve higher complementarity of contributions in terms of the content and perspective: lower semantic entrainment and less frequent (but richer) lexical and syntactic entrainment. Finally, we show that the observed variations in the use of conversational devices are potentially adaptive: pairs of interlocutors that show stronger linguistic complementarity perform better across the two tasks. By combining motivated comparisons of several conversational contexts and theoretically informed computational analyses of empirical data the present work lays the foundations for a comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the use of conversational devices in dialogue. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

On the social nature of abstraction: cognitive implications of interaction and diversity.

The human capacity for abstraction is remarkable. We effortlessly form abstract representations from varied experiences, generalizing and flexibly transferring experiences and knowledge between contexts, which can facilitate reasoning, problem solving and learning across many domains. The cognitive process of abstraction, however, is often portrayed and investigated as an individual process. This paper addresses how cognitive processes of abstraction-together with other aspects of human reasoning and problem solving-are fundamentally shaped and modulated by online social interaction. Starting from a general distinction between convergent thinking, divergent thinking and processes of abstraction, we address how social interaction shapes information processing differently depending on cognitive demands, social coordination and task ecologies. In particular, we suggest that processes of abstraction are facilitated by the interactive sharing and integration of varied individual experiences. To this end, we also discuss how the dynamics of group interactions vary as a function of group composition; that is, in terms of the similarity and diversity between the group members. We conclude by outlining the role of cognitive diversity in interactive processes and consider the importance of group diversity in processes of abstraction. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Cognitive-Cultural Looping Mechanism of Urban Space Conceptualization.

A crucial point for urban design is the acknowledgement that urban material structures are not only constituting a set of cognitive-cultural affordances that shapes people's behavior and experiential world, but likewise that the design process itself is an expression of cultural conceptualizations possibly evoked by ongoing cultural practices and perceptions, thus forming a dynamic loop. In this paper, we outline a framework for the study of material, cultural and social mechanisms interacting with human cognition, behavior and emotions. We attempt a conceptual model that integrates dynamic interactions between cognitive-cultural affordances and our conceptualization of the environment and provides a few illustrative case examples. The model proposes a set of dynamic relations between cognitive and cultural processes at shorter time scales modifying conceptualizations and environmental affordances on longer timescales, while these - in turn - come to guide and constrain processes at the shorter timescales. The model has important implications for our understanding of the role of environmental design, especially urban design, as bridging between aspects of human situated experience, behavior, social and cultural norms and material culture.

The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens.

How did human symbolic behavior evolve? Dating up to about 100,000 y ago, the engraved ochre and ostrich eggshell fragments from the South African Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter provide a unique window into presumed early symbolic traditions of Homo sapiens and how they evolved over a period of more than 30,000 y. Using the engravings as stimuli, we report five experiments which suggest that the engravings evolved adaptively, becoming better-suited for human perception and cognition. More specifically, they became more salient, memorable, reproducible, and expressive of style and human intent. However, they did not become more discriminable over time between or within the two archeological sites. Our observations provide support for an account of the Blombos and Diepkloof engravings as decorations and as socially transmitted cultural traditions. By contrast, there was no clear indication that they served as denotational symbolic signs. Our findings have broad implications for our understanding of early symbolic communication and cognition in H. sapiens.

Language beyond the language system: Dorsal visuospatial pathways support processing of demonstratives and spatial language during naturalistic fast fMRI.

Spatial demonstratives are powerful linguistic tools used to establish joint attention. Identifying the meaning of semantically underspecified expressions like "this one" hinges on the integration of linguistic and visual cues, attentional orienting and pragmatic inference. This synergy between language and extralinguistic cognition is pivotal to language comprehension in general, but especially prominent in demonstratives. In this study, we aimed to elucidate which neural architectures enable this intertwining between language and extralinguistic cognition using a naturalistic fMRI paradigm. In our experiment, 28 participants listened to a specially crafted dialogical narrative with a controlled number of spatial demonstratives. A fast multiband-EPI acquisition sequence (TR = 388 m s) combined with finite impulse response (FIR) modelling of the hemodynamic response was used to capture signal changes at word-level resolution. We found that spatial demonstratives bilaterally engage a network of parietal areas, including the supramarginal gyrus, the angular gyrus, and precuneus, implicated in information integration and visuospatial processing. Moreover, demonstratives recruit frontal regions, including the right FEF, implicated in attentional orienting and reference frames shifts. Finally, using multivariate similarity analyses, we provide evidence for a general involvement of the dorsal ("where") stream in the processing of spatial expressions, as opposed to ventral pathways encoding object semantics. Overall, our results suggest that language processing relies on a distributed architecture, recruiting neural resources for perception, attention, and extra-linguistic aspects of cognition in a dynamic and context-dependent fashion.

This is for you: Social modulations of proximal vs. distal space in collaborative interaction.

Human spatial representations are shaped by affordances for action offered by the environment. A prototypical example is the organization of space into peripersonal (within reach) and extrapersonal (outside reach) regions, mirrored by proximal (this/here) and distal (that/there) linguistic expressions. The peri-/extrapersonal distinction has been widely investigated in individual contexts, but little is known about how spatial representations are modulated by interaction with other people. Is near/far coding of space dynamically adapted to the position of a partner when space, objects, and action goals are shared? Over two preregistered experiments based on a novel interactive paradigm, we show that, in individual and social contexts involving no direct collaboration, linguistic coding of locations as proximal or distal depends on their distance from the speaker's hand. In contrast, in the context of collaborative interactions involving turn-taking and role reversal, proximal space is shifted towards the partner, and linguistic coding of near space ('this' / 'here') is remapped onto the partner's action space.

This shoe, that tiger: Semantic properties reflecting manual affordances of the referent modulate demonstrative use.

Demonstrative reference is central to human communication. But what influences our choice of demonstrative forms such as "this" and "that" in discourse? Previous literature has mapped the use of such "proximal" and "distal" demonstratives onto spatial properties of referents, such as their distance from the speaker. We investigated whether object semantics, and specifically functional properties of referents, also influence speakers' choices of either demonstrative form. Over two experiments, we presented English, Danish and Italian speakers with words denoting animate and inanimate objects, differing in size and harmfulness, and asked them to match them with a proximal or a distal demonstrative. Objects that offer more affordances for manipulation (smaller and harmless) elicited significantly more proximal demonstratives. These effects were stronger for inanimate referents, in line with the predictions of sensory-functional views on object semantics. These results suggest that demonstrative use may be partly grounded on manual affordances, and hints at the possibility of using demonstratives as a proxy to investigate the organization of semantic knowledge.

The emergence of systematicity: How environmental and communicative factors shape a novel communication system.

Where does linguistic structure come from? We suggest that systematicity in language evolves adaptively in response to environmental and contextual affordances associated with the practice of communication itself. In two experiments, we used a silent gesture referential game paradigm to investigate environmental and social factors promoting the propagation of systematicity in a novel communication system. We found that structure in the emerging communication systems evolve contingent on structural properties of the environment. More specifically, interlocutors spontaneously relied on structural features of the referent stimuli they communicated about to motivate systematic aspects of the evolving communication system even when idiosyncratic iconic strategies were equally afforded. Furthermore, we found systematicity to be promoted by the nature of the referent environment. When the referent environment was open and unstable, analytic systematic strategies were more likely to emerge compared to stimulus environments with a closed set of referents. Lastly, we found that displacement of communication promoted systematicity. That is, when interlocutors had to communicate about items not immediately present in the moment of communication, they were more likely to evolve systematic solutions, supposedly due to working memory advantages. Together, our findings provide experimental evidence for the idea that linguistic structure evolves adaptively from contextually situated language use.

Performance of Language-Coordinated Collective Systems: A Study of Wine Recognition and Description.

Most of our perceptions of and engagements with the world are shaped by our immersion in social interactions, cultural traditions, tools and linguistic categories. In this study we experimentally investigate the impact of two types of language-based coordination on the recognition and description of complex sensory stimuli: that of red wine. Participants were asked to taste, remember and successively recognize samples of wines within a larger set in a two-by-two experimental design: (1) either individually or in pairs, and (2) with or without the support of a sommelier card-a cultural linguistic tool designed for wine description. Both effectiveness of recognition and the kinds of errors in the four conditions were analyzed. While our experimental manipulations did not impact recognition accuracy, bias-variance decomposition of error revealed non-trivial differences in how participants solved the task. Pairs generally displayed reduced bias and increased variance compared to individuals, however the variance dropped significantly when they used the sommelier card. The effect of sommelier card reducing the variance was observed only in pairs, individuals did not seem to benefit from the cultural linguistic tool. Analysis of descriptions generated with the aid of sommelier cards shows that pairs were more coherent and discriminative than individuals. The findings are discussed in terms of global properties and dynamics of collective systems when constrained by different types of cultural practices.

Trails of meaning construction: Symbolic artifacts engage the social brain.

Symbolic artifacts present a challenge to theories of neurocognitive processing due to their hybrid nature: they are at the same time physical objects and vehicles of intangible social meanings. While their physical properties can be read of their perceptual appearance, the meaning of symbolic artifacts depends on the perceiver's interpretative attitude and embeddedness in cultural practices. In this study, participants built models of LEGO bricks to illustrate their understanding of abstract concepts. They were then scanned with fMRI while presented to photographs of their own and others' models. When participants attended to the meaning of the models in contrast to their bare physical properties, we observed activations in mPFC and TPJ, areas often associated with social cognition, and IFG, possibly related to semantics. When contrasting own and others' models, we also found activations in precuneus, an area associated with autobiographical memory and agency, while looking at one's own collective models yielded interaction effects in rostral ACC, right IFG and left Insula. Interestingly, variability in the insula was predicted by individual differences in participants' feeling of relatedness to their fellow group members during LEGO construction activity. Our findings support a view of symbolic artifacts as neuro-cognitive trails of human social interactions.

A heart for interaction: Shared physiological dynamics and behavioral coordination in a collective, creative construction task.

Interpersonally shared physiological dynamics are increasingly argued to underlie rapport, empathy, and even team performance. Inspired by the model of interpersonal synergy, we critically investigate the presence, temporal development, possible mechanisms and impact of shared interpersonal heart rate (HR) dynamics during individual and collective creative LEGO® construction tasks. In Study 1 we show how shared HR dynamics are driven by a plurality of sources, including task constraints and behavioral coordination. Generally, shared HR dynamics are more prevalent in individual trials (involving participants doing the same things) than in collective ones (involving participants taking turns and performing complementary actions). However, when contrasted against virtual pairs, collective trials display more stable shared HR dynamics suggesting that online social interaction plays an important role. Furthermore, in contrast to individual trials, shared HR dynamics are found to increase across collective trials. Study 2 investigates which aspects of social interaction might drive these effects. We show that shared HR dynamics are statistically predicted by interpersonal speech and building coordination. In Study 3, we explore the relation between HR dynamics, behavioral coordination, and self-reported measures of rapport and group competence. Although behavioral coordination predicts rapport and group competence, shared HR dynamics do not. Although shared physiological dynamics were reliably observed in our study, our results warrant not to consider HR dynamics a general driving mechanism of social coordination. Behavioral coordination-on the other hand-seems to be more informative of both shared physiological dynamics and collective experience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Environmental constraints shaping constituent order in emerging communication systems: Structural iconicity, interactive alignment and conventionalization.

Where does linguistic structure come from? Recent gesture elicitation studies have indicated that constituent order (corresponding to for instance subject-verb-object, or SVO in English) may be heavily influenced by human cognitive biases constraining gesture production and transmission. Here we explore the alternative hypothesis that syntactic patterns are motivated by multiple environmental and social-interactional constraints that are external to the cognitive domain. In three experiments, we systematically investigate different motivations for structure in the gestural communication of simple transitive events. The first experiment indicates that, if participants communicate about different types of events, manipulation events (e.g. someone throwing a cake) and construction events (e.g. someone baking a cake), they spontaneously and systematically produce different constituent orders, SOV and SVO respectively, thus following the principle of structural iconicity. The second experiment shows that participants' choice of constituent order is also reliably influenced by social-interactional forces of interactive alignment, that is, the tendency to re-use an interlocutor's previous choice of constituent order, thus potentially overriding affordances for iconicity. Lastly, the third experiment finds that the relative frequency distribution of referent event types motivates the stabilization and conventionalization of a single constituent order for the communication of different types of events. Together, our results demonstrate that constituent order in emerging gestural communication systems is shaped and stabilized in response to multiple external environmental and social factors: structural iconicity, interactive alignment and distributional frequency.

Investigating Conversational Dynamics: Interactive Alignment, Interpersonal Synergy, and Collective Task Performance.

This study investigates interpersonal processes underlying dialog by comparing two approaches, interactive alignment and interpersonal synergy, and assesses how they predict collective performance in a joint task. While the interactive alignment approach highlights imitative patterns between interlocutors, the synergy approach points to structural organization at the level of the interaction-such as complementary patterns straddling speech turns and interlocutors. We develop a general, quantitative method to assess lexical, prosodic, and speech/pause patterns related to the two approaches and their impact on collective performance in a corpus of task-oriented conversations. The results show statistical presence of patterns relevant for both approaches. However, synergetic aspects of dialog provide the best statistical predictors of collective performance and adding aspects of the alignment approach does not improve the model. This suggests that structural organization at the level of the interaction plays a crucial role in task-oriented conversations, possibly constraining and integrating processes related to alignment.

Training in Compensatory Strategies Enhances Rapport in Interactions Involving People with Möbius Syndrome.

In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the study, five teenagers with MS interacted with three naïve participants without MS before the intervention, and with three different naïve participants without MS after the intervention. Rapport was assessed by self-report and by behavioral coders who rated videos of the interactions. Individual non-verbal behavior was assessed via behavioral coders, whereas verbal behavior was automatically extracted from the sound files. Alignment was assessed using cross recurrence quantification analysis and mixed-effects models. The results showed that observer-coded rapport was greater after the intervention, whereas self-reported rapport did not change significantly. Observer-coded gesture and expressivity increased in participants with and without MS, whereas overall linguistic alignment decreased. Fidgeting and repetitiveness of verbal behavior also decreased in both groups. In sum, the intervention may impact non-verbal and verbal behavior in participants with and without MS, increasing rapport as well as overall gesturing, while decreasing alignment.

Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human communicative practices.

Recent experiments in semiotics and linguistics demonstrate that groups tend to converge on a common set of signs or terms in response to presented problems, experiments which potentially bear on the emergence and establishment of institutional interactions. Taken together, these studies indicate a spectrum, ranging from the spontaneous convergence of communicative practices to their eventual conventionalization, a process which might be described as an implicit institutionalization of those practices. However, the emergence of such convergence and conventionalization does not in itself constitute an institution, in the strict sense of a social organization partly created and governed by explicit rules. A further step toward institutions proper may occur when others are instructed about a task. That is, given task situations which select for successful practices, instructions about such situations make explicit what was tacit practice, instructions which can then be followed correctly or incorrectly. This transition gives rise to the normative distinction between conditions of success versus conditions of correctness, a distinction which will be explored and complicated in the course of this paper. Using these experiments as a basis, then, the emergence of institutions will be characterized in evolutionary and normative terms, beginning with our adaptive responses to the selective pressures of certain situational environments, and continuing with our capacity to then shape, constrain, and institute those environments to further refine and streamline our problem-solving activity.