Language and thought: the fundamental significance of conversational awareness for cognitive development

According to Piagetian accounts of cognitive development, children’s responses on many tasks reflect the lack of evidence for an operational competence that is conceptual rather than linguistic. In this paper, I show that such accounts assume that young children are endowed with substantial conversational wizardry, allowing them to interpret questions about cognitive tasks as intended by the experimenter. Once it is explicitly recognized that children may be less advanced in their conversational awareness than is commonly assumed, their competence can be assessed more accurately. Recent and new evidence from a variety of sources, such as research on conservation, suggestibility in memory, and theory of mind understanding in deaf and hearing children, converges to indicate that competence is inadequately characterized by a dichotomy between pre-operational and operational logic and that what is developing in children’s cognition is a complex interplay between both conversational and conceptual processes. This evidence is not merely relevant to methodological concerns. It demands a radical shift in cognitive developmental theory and research to account for the importance of children’s conversational awareness.     

Some steps towards a general theory of relevance

The classical analysis of relevance in probabilistic terms does not fit legal, moral or conversational relevance, and, though analysis in terms of a psychological model may fit conversational relevance, it certainly does not fit legal, moral or evidential relevance. It is important to notice here that some sentences are ambiguous between conversational and non-conversational relevance. But, if and only ifR is relevant to a questionQ, R is a reason, though not necessarily a complete or conclusive reason, for accepting or rejecting something as an answer toQ. Reasons of this kind are governed by appropriate covering laws or principled probabilities and a number of questions thus arise about the relationship between relevance and certain formal-logical properties.     

Can negative mood improve your conversation? Affective influences on conforming to Grice's communication norms

Can temporary mood influence people's communication strategies? According to Grice's cooperative principle, conversational utterances should ideally conform to the maxims of quantity, relevance, quality, and manner. Three experiments predicted and found that participants in a negative mood complied significantly better with Grice's maxims than did participants in a positive mood when using natural language to describe a previously observed social event. Experiments 2 and 3 further confirmed that mood influenced communication strategies, and not merely the encoding (Exp. 2) and retrieval (Exp. 3) of the relevant information. These findings are consistent with affect–cognition theories predicting that positive affect promotes a more internally focused and assimilative thinking and communication style, and negative mood promotes more externally focused and accommodative thinking, resulting in the closer observance of communication norms. The relevance of these findings for recent affect/cognition theories is considered, and the practical implications of the results for everyday conversational strategies are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When is a question not answered? The understanding of young children of utterances violating or conforming to the rules of conversational sequencing

Knowledge of the conventional rules of conversational sequencing enables a speaker or listener to evaluate the pragmatic use of an utterance. This study explored young children's ability to discriminate among utterances that violated or conformed to these rules (Experiment 1), and ability to explain rule violations (Experiment 2). In both experiments children were read short episodes containing utterances that conformed to the rules in that the utterances were used appropriately in the episodic context of utterance, or utterances that violated the conversational rules of contingency, relevance, or informativeness. In Experiment 1, kindergarten, and first- and second-grade children (5, 6, and 7 years of age) were asked to discriminate among the conforming and rule violating utterances by assigning each utterance to one of two female conventional and unconventional speakers. The results showed that the first and second graders, but not the kindergarten children, generally discriminated among the utterances. In Experiment 2, first and third graders (6 and 8 years of age) were asked to explain the rule violations. The results showed that only the third graders consistently generated correct explanations. These results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent in deliberately violating a rule by 6 or 7 years of age, but do not correctly infer that intent until they are 8 or 9 years old.     

Teaching conversational speech to children with autism spectrum disorder using text‐message prompting

The present study was designed to teach conversational speech using text‐message prompts to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in home play settings with siblings and peers. A multiple baseline design across children was used. Children learned conversational speech through the text‐message prompts, and the behavior generalized across peers and settings. Maintenance of treatment gains was seen at 1‐month follow‐up probes. Social validity measures indicated that parents of typically developing children viewed the participants' conversational speech as much improved after the intervention. Results are discussed in terms of the efficacy of text‐message prompts as a promising way to improve conversational speech for children with ASD.     

The effects of good moods on systematic processing: “Willing but not able,or able but not willing?”

Previous research has indicated that good moods may disrupt systematic processing of persuasive messages (e.g., Worth & Mackie, 1987). Three experiments were conducted to attempt a replication of this disruptive effect and determine whether this effect is attributable either to cognitive capacity deficits (i.e., ability) or to motivational concerns (e.g., mood maintenance, desire to think about something other than the experimental topic). Several similarities were noted across the experiments. First, no interactions between mood and argument strength emerged on measures of message-based persuasion. Similarly, the quantity of message-related thoughts generated by our subjects was not consistently influenced by the manipulation of mood. Most importantly, consistent findings regarding the relationship between polarity of message elaborations and message-based persuasion implied that good moods may have disrupted message processing when (a) the message was low in personal relevance, (b) source information preceded the message itself, or (c) subjects were led to believe that their moods were stabilized by a drug. These results call into question the robustness of the alleged disruptive effect of positive mood on systematic processing, and are incompatible with the view that such effects are attributable to cognitive capacity deficits.Portions of this research were presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, Boston, August 1990, and San Francisco, August 1991. The authors wish to thank Richard E. Petty and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Investigating the Language of Sexting on the Social Media and Its Impact on Spousal Relationships in Nigeria

Several scholarly works abound on the language of sexting and how it affects users’ lives. This study is an attempt to investigate the language of sexting on the social media and its impact on spousal relationship in Nigeria. Sexting is defined here as the sending and receiving of sexually inclined messages or pictures via any of the social media. We have purposively selected a screenshot sexting message of a popular Nigerian comedian. The methodology adopted is eclectic. We use pragmatic tools with insights from the epistemological and critical tools of philosophy. We also use ideas from semiotics to analyse the smileys in the text. We also conducted interviews with purposively selected educated married Nigerians to study the printed screenshot message and interpret the meanings they can deduce from the message. Findings reveal that the language of sexting is highly of coded forms. The discourse strategies used include: slang, ellipsis and smileys. The conversational pattern reveals a flouting of the conversational maxims of quantity and relevance. A lot of shared beliefs are also foregrounded in the use of the elliptical sign and slang words. The message attached to the screenshot message is a pract of warning with 3 speech acts: declarative, assertive and directive. Sexting is a common feature of new trends on the social media. It serves several functions for the chat partners. If the motivation for sexting is not understood, its practice could generate crises among spouses. Sexting opens up different angles for linguistic interpretation and its psychological realities cannot be generalized.     

Message Exchange Games in Strategic Contexts

When two people engage in a conversation, knowingly or unknowingly, they are playing a game. Players of such games have diverse objectives, or winning conditions: an applicant trying to convince her potential employer of her eligibility over that of a competitor, a prosecutor trying to convict a defendant, a politician trying to convince an electorate in a political debate, and so on. We argue that infinitary games offer a natural model for many structural characteristics of such conversations. We call such games message exchange games, and we compare them to existing game theoretic frameworks used in linguistics—for example, signaling games—and show that message exchange games are needed to handle non-cooperative conversation. In this paper, we concentrate on conversational games where players’ interests are opposed. We provide a taxonomy of conversations based on their winning conditions, and we investigate some essential features of winning conditions like consistency and what we call rhetorical cooperativity. We show that these features make our games decomposition sensitive, a property we define formally in the paper. We show that this property has far-reaching implications for the existence of winning strategies and their complexity. There is a class of winning conditions (decomposition invariant winning conditions) for which message exchange games are equivalent to Banach- Mazur games, which have been extensively studied and enjoy nice topological results. But decomposition sensitive goals are much more the norm and much more interesting linguistically and philosophically.     

Causes versus enabling conditions.

People distinguish between a cause (e.g., a malfunctioning component in an airplane causing it to crash) and a condition (e.g., gravity) that merely enables the cause to yield its effect. This distinction cannot be explained by accounts of reasoning formulated purely in terms of necessity and sufficiency, because causes and enabling conditions hold the same logical relationship to the effect in those terms. Proposals to account for this apparent deviation from accounts based on necessity and sufficiency may be classified into three types. One approach explains the distinction in terms of an inferential rule based on the normality of the potential causal factors. Another approach explains the distinction in terms of the conversational principle of being informative to the inquirer given assumptions about his or her state of knowledge. The present paper evaluates variants of these two approaches, and presents our probabilistic contrast model, which takes a third approach. This approach explains the distinction between causes and enabling conditions by the covariation between potential causes and the effect in question over a focal set--a set of events implied by the context. Covariation is defined probabilistically, with necessity and sufficiency as extreme cases of the components defining contrasts. We report two experiments testing our model against variants of the normality and conversational views.     

Telling what they want to know: participants tailor causal attributions to researchers' interests

Based on a conversational analysis of experimental procedures and consistent with the principle of relevance, we predicted that participants' verbal responses will be influenced by their tacit inferences about the researcher's epistemic goals, derived from their knowledge of the researcher's academic affiliation. We tested this prediction in a core area of social‐personality and cultural psychology, causal attribution. University students provided causal attributions about mass murder cases, while the questionnaire identified the researcher either as a social scientist or a personality psychologist. The results indicated that attributions were overall more situational than dispositional, and as predicted, this main effect was qualified by an interaction between conversational cue and type of attribution. Thus, participants gave relatively more situational explanations when the letterhead of the questionnaire identified the researcher as a social scientist compared to when the researcher was identified as a personality psychologist. The reverse pattern emerged for dispositional attributions. Methodological and conceptual implications are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

品牌熟悉对广告过程中品牌态度改变的影响

文章通过分析广告前后被试者品牌态度的变化,研究了在不同的广告态度和信息相关度条件下被试者品牌熟悉程度对品牌态度变化的影响。结果显示品牌熟悉程度对品牌态度变化的调节作用并非单向的,而是与广告态度和信息相关度交互产生作用的。当被试者不熟悉品牌且有正面的广告态度时或当被试者不熟悉品牌且信息相关度较低时广告才能产生说服效果,进而使被试者的品牌态度发生改变。     

Bringing the frame into focus: the influence of regulatory fit on processing fluency and persuasion

This research demonstrates that people's goals associated with regulatory focus moderate the effect of message framing on persuasion. The results of 6 experiments show that appeals presented in gain frames are more persuasive when the message is promotion focused, whereas loss-framed appeals are more persuasive when the message is prevention focused. These regulatory focus effects suggesting heightened vigilance against negative outcomes and heightened eagerness toward positive outcomes are replicated when perceived risk is manipulated. Enhanced processing fluency leading to more favorable evaluations in conditions of compatibility appears to underlie these effects. The findings underscore the regulatory fit principle that accounts for the persuasiveness of message framing effects and highlight how processing fluency may contribute to the "feeling right" experience when the strategy of goal pursuit matches one's goal.     

The Conversation MOP II. Progression Through Scenes in Discourse

Based on previous research demonstrating that a conversation MOP (memory organization packet) exists that organizes scenes (topics) in conversations, this research explores the generalizability of the MOP when faced with differing situational demands. This research tests a normative sequential progression claim of the MOP perspective by examining the degree to which the MOP permits routine progression in topical talk in initial interactions as acquaintance goals vary. As predicted, dyads having similar acquaintanceship goals were found to exhibit similar conversational structures; the conversational structures for dyads having differing acquaintanceship goals were also found to be similar; and the progression of dyads through conversations in terms of transitions between topics also exhibited structural invariance. It was therefore concluded that (a) certain topics of talk occur almost regardless of acquaintanceship desires despite idiosyncratic additions, (b) multiple topics of talk are appropriate at any given point but what is appropriate at one point is not appropriate at other points, and (c) conversational sequencing follows a normative progression. In other words, conversational behavior is both routine and adaptive, although the adaptation is in itself routine.     

Exploring Message Framing Outcomes When Systematic,Heuristic, or Both Types of Processing Occur

Mixed findings have emerged in message framing studies, even when such studies employ the same general type of framing, such as goal framing. This article attempts to show that by extending the heuristic–systematic model‐based explanation of message framing effects to incorporate conditions that may prompt both systematic and heuristic processing, this theory may accommodate some of the aberrant findings. The research reported shows that by varying a message issue's risky implications and its personal relevance, 2 factors that potentially influence the type of processing people employ, systematic, heuristic, or concurrently both types of processing were evoked and influenced people's judgments, causing alternative patterns of message framing effects to occur. The results offer insight into how each of these types of processing can affect message framing outcomes, and they imply that certain seemingly aberrant findings in the literature can be reconciled with this extended theory.     

Conversational scorekeeping and conditionals

David Lewis has recently developed the notion of conversational score-keeping as a way of explaining the acceptability of utterances in various contexts and the manner in which this acceptability changes in a rule-governed manner. I will expand Lewis's discussion by showing how the acceptibility of conditionals is linked to conversational score. In particular, I will argue that at least one controversial issue concerning the logic of conditionals, the interpretation and use of conditionals with disjunctive antecedents, may be resolved by applying Lewis's notion of an accommodation rule for conversational scorekeeping.1|This paper has benefitted from the helpful criticisms of two anonymous referees.     

Talking Health With a Machine: How Does Message Interactivity Affect Attitudes and Cognitions?

By affording interactive communication and natural, human‐like conversations, can media tools affect the way we engage with content in human–machine interactions and influence our attitudes toward that content? A between‐subjects experiment (N = 172) examined the effects of two communication variables: (a) message‐interactivity and (b) conversational tone, in an online health information (Q&A) tool. Findings suggest that informal conversational tone lowers perceptions of relative susceptibility to health risks. Perceived contingency positively mediates the influence of message interactivity on individuals' health attitudes and behavioral intentions whereas perceived interactivity negatively mediates the relationships between these variables. These contrasting mediation effects are further explored via a phantom model analysis that tests two theoretically distinct paths, with implications for both theory and practice.     

International study on the importance of communication between automated vehicles and pedestrians

The market launch of automated vehicles will take place in complex mixed traffic containing pedestrians and other non-automated drivers. Hand gestures, eye contact or similar informal communication strategies to human road users will not be available without a human car driver. Road crossing studies show that people are feeling confused and unsafe without such feedback. Additional external signaling devices have the aim to increase the perception of safety by providing auditory or visual feedback for road users. Due to the international relevance of this topic, we surveyed participants from six countries on the importance of communication. Our results reveal that intention messages are more important than the status signal. The importance of communication is independent of the time of day, traffic density and number of pedestrians. Cross-group analysis indicates a match of 72.97% between the tested nationalities on which kind of message types an automated vehicle should be able to communicate.     

Relational message interpretations of nonverbal matching behavior: an application of the social meaning model

The social meaning model asserts that some nonverbal behaviors have consensually recognized relational meanings within a given social community. According to this perspective, the interpretations made by encoders, decoders, and 3rd-party observers of the same nonverbal behavior should be congruent. The authors applied the model to the identification of relational message interpretations of nonverbal matching behavior. Confederates either matched or did not match the nonverbal behaviors of conversational participants while being watched by nonparticipant observers. All three nonconfederate participants provided interpretations of the confederates' relational messages. As the authors had expected, there were moderate correlations between the 3 perspectives, with observers usually providing less favorable assessments than the conversational participants. The authors also examined the influence of positive and negative stimulus behavior on relational message interpretations.     

Clarifying the relationship between AS dimensions and PTSD symptom clusters: are negative and positive affectivity theoretically relevant constructs?

The association between anxiety sensitivity (AS) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been established in contemporary literature; however, research is divided over the nature of specific relationships between AS dimensions and PTSD symptoms clusters. Further, a paucity of research has examined the AS and PTSD relationship while accounting for theoretically relevant variables, such as negative (NA) and positive affect (PA). The purpose of the current study was twofold: first, to clarify divergent findings regarding the contribution of AS dimensions to PTSD symptom clusters, and, second, to further assess the relevance of NA and PA within the AS/PTSD relationship. Hierarchal regression analyses showed that, beyond shared variance attributable to NA and PA, AS somatic concerns were significantly associated with three of four PTSD symptom (i.e., reexperiencing, numbing, hyperarousal), AS cognitive concerns were only associated with hyperarousal, and AS socially observable symptoms were not significantly associated with any PTSD symptom clusters. These findings suggest that AS somatic concerns are the most robust predictor of variance within the AS/PTSD relationship and further clarify the theoretical importance of NA and PA within this relationship. Comprehensive results, implication, and directions for future research are discussed.