Enhanced Conversational Recall and Reduced Conversational Interference as a Function of Cognitive Complexity

This study examines the relationship between cognitive complexity and conversational recall. Three hypotheses are put forward arguing that individuals high in cognitive complexity will (a) recall more person-oriented conversational information, (b) recall more person-oriented information in an interference condition, and (c) recall more total information from a conversation than subjects low in cognitive complexity. Subjects were 72 college students who observed a video taped conversation. Recall was elicited by means of a free recall task and an 18-item multiple choice test. MANOVA and canonical discriminant-analysis results support each hypotheses.     

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.     

对话环境与心理理论发展

大量研究表明,心理理论和语言之间存在着密切的关系,其中对话环境是研究的重要内容之一。纵观国内外关于微观的家庭对话环境和宏观的社会文化环境对儿童心理理论影响的最新研究,表明对话是儿童心理理论充分发展的基础。未来关于儿童心理理论发展的研究,主要包括扩大研究主题,改善研究工具和揭示研究机制等。     

Knowledge of Pragmatic Conversational Structure

Knowledge of conversational pragmatic structure was examined by asking 53 female volunteers to rate the naturalness of three versions of an appointment-making conversation from a beauty salon. One version was the naturally occurring conversation. The other two were its two most frequent reconstructions created by a separate group of subjects asked to put the scrambled natural conversation back together again. A chi-square lest and standardized deviates showed that the naturally occurring conversation was rated as the most natural one. This result is attributed to subjects' implicit knowledge about conversational pragmatic structure. The role that this knowledge might play in language comprehension is discussed.     

Conversational role influences speech imitation

This study assessed the impact of a conscious imitation goal on phonetic convergence during conversational interaction. Twelve pairs of unacquainted talkers participated in a conversational task designed to elicit between-talker repetitions of the same lexical items. To assess the degree to which the talkers exhibited phonetic convergence during the conversational task, these repetitions were used to elicit perceptual similarity judgments provided by separate sets of listeners. In addition, perceptual measures of phonetic convergence were compared with measures of articulation rates and vowel formants. The sex of the pair of talkers and a talker's role influenced the degree of phonetic convergence, and perceptual judgments of phonetic convergence were not consistently related to individual acoustic-phonetic attributes. Therefore, even with a conscious imitative goal, situational factors were shown to retain a strong influence on phonetic form in conversational interaction.     

Situated Inference versus Conversational Implicature

As Grice defined it, a speaker conversationally implicates that p only if the speaker expects the hearer to recognize that the speaker thinks that p . This paper argues that in the sorts of cases that Grice took as paradigmatic examples of conversational implicature there is in fact no need for the hearer to consider what the speaker might thus have in mind. Instead, the hearer might simply make an inference from what the speaker literally says and the situation in which the utterance takes place. In addition, a number of sources of the illusion of conversational implicatures in Grice's sense are identified and diagnosed.     

Complexity and coherency: integrating information in the brain

The brains of higher mammals are extraordinary integrative devices. Signals from large numbers of functionally specialized groups of neurons distributed over many brain regions are integrated to generate a coherent, multimodal scene. Signals from the environment are integrated with ongoing, patterned neural activity that provides them with a meaningful context. We review recent advances in neurophysiology and neuroimaging that are beginning to reveal the neural mechanisms of integration. In addition, we discuss concepts and measures derived from information theory that lend a theoretical basis to the notion of complexity as integration of information and suggest new experimental tests of these concepts.     

Conversational skill and locus of perception

The present study attempted to identify behavioral skills associated with global perceptions of communication competence and to determine if the relationship between competence and skills varies as a function of perceptual locus. Fifteen dyadic conversations were videotaped. Each interactant rated self and partner and was rated by four observers who viewed each tape. Results indicated that subjects' perceptions of their partners' skills accounted for 87% of the variance in subjects' ratings of partners' competence and 80% of the variance in subjects'self-perceived confirmation. Observers' ratings of subjects' skills predicted 83% of the variance in observers' ratings of subjects' competence. Observers'ratings of subjects'skills were unrelated to subjects' self-rated competence.     

On Defining Conversational Coordination and Rapport

In 1957, Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance burst on the scene and revitalized social psychology with its deft blend of cognition and motivation. For the next two decades, the theory inspired an extraordinary amount of exciting research leading to a burgeoning of knowledge about human social behavior. The theory has been referred to as "the most important single development in social psychology to date" (Jones, 1976, p. x). But, by the mid-1970s the allure of the theory began to wane as interest in the entire topic of motivation faded and the journals were all but overwhelmed by the incredible popularity of purely cognitive approaches to social psychology. Recently, social psychologists seem to have rediscovered motivation and several mini- theories have emerged blending cognition with motivation-in much the same way that Festinger did some 35 years ago. This article traces the history of these developments and attempts a synthesis of some of the newer theories with the dissonance research of the late 1950s and early 1960s.     

Embedded Pragmatic Effects and Conversational Implicatures

In a recent paper Mandy Simons has argued that in a Gricean framework there is room for embedded pragmatic effects. One of her goals has been to demonstrate that an argument put forward by François Recanati to the effect that it is not possible to apply Gricean reasoning to generation of local pragmatic effects is mistaken. In his commentary Recanati maintains that the view suggested by Simons can be called Gricean only in a very broad sense and insists that the process responsible for local effects is essentially different from the one which generates conversational implicatures. In my view their exchange highlights important issues concerning the way in which local pragmatic effects are generated and is worthy of a careful analysis. In what follows I critically examine Simons’s and Recanati’s views and then suggest the view that in the light of this analysis seems to me the most adequate. In particular, I argue—against Recanati—that during the interpretation process interpreters construct literal propositional nuclei, which usually fell short of being truth-evaluable but which play an important role in the interpretation. I claim that the view that assumes that such literal propositions are constructed in the process of interpretation is more universal and may be used to analyse a wider range of examples than the view that does not postulate such constructions. Nevertheless, I maintain—against Simons—that the global and local pragmatic inferences are importantly different.

     

Evolution of Conventional Meaning and Conversational Principles

In this paper we study language use and language organisation by making use of Lewisean signalling games. Standard game theoretical approaches are contrasted with evolutionary ones to analyze conventional meaning and conversational interpretation strategies. It is argued that analyzing successful communication in terms of standard game theory requires agents to be very rational and fully informed. The main goal of the paper is to show that in terms of evolutionary game theory we can motivate the emergence and self-sustaining force of (i) conventional meaning and (ii) some conversational interpretation strategies in terms of weaker and, perhaps, more plausible assumptions.     

Meaning and Conversational Impropriety in Sceptical Contexts

According to “disjunctivist neo‐Mooreanism”—a position Duncan Pritchard develops in a recent book—it is possible to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses, even though it is conversationally inappropriate to claim such knowledge. In a recent paper, on the other hand, Pritchard expounds an “überhinge” strategy, according to which one cannot know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, as “hinge propositions” are necessarily groundless. The present article argues that neither strategy is entirely successful. For if a proposition can be known, it can also be claimed to be known. If the latter is not possible, this is not because certain propositions are either “intrinsically” conversationally inappropriate (as Pritchard claims in his book) or else “rationally groundless” (as Pritchard claims in his paper), but rather that we are dealing with something that merely presents us with the appearance of being an epistemic claim.     

Conversational Narrative and the Moral Self:

This article presents material from my ethnographic study in Śringēri, south India, the site of a powerful 1200‐year‐old Advaitic monastery that has been historically an interpreter of ancient Hindu moral treatises. A vibrant diverse local culture that provides plural sources of moral authority makes Śringēri a rich site for studying moral discourse. Through a study of two conversational narratives, this essay illustrates how the moral self is not an ossified product of written texts and codes, but is dynamic, gendered, and emergent, endowed with historical and political agency and an aesthetic capacity that mediates many normative sources to articulate “appropriate” conduct. In so doing, the essay shows the value of including oral narrative in ethical inquiry, especially in narrative ethics, which, for most part, has focused on written sources.     

Predicting Conversational Reports of a Personal Event

This study concerns topic selection in conversational reports of a personal event, the birth of a baby. Ninety phone calls from 12 fathers and 7 mothers were analyzed in terms of the subject's prior concerns (prenatal questionnaire) and the outcome of events (postpartum questionnaire). Four analyses were conducted. The first showed that subjects were likely to mention topics of high, rather than low, prior concern, and unusual, rather than ordinary, outcome. The second showed that chronologically early topics were discussed before late topics. These findings were compatible with either a memory (i.e., “knowledge telling”) or a communication (i.e., “knowledge processing”) model of topic selection. Two additional analyses were conducted to evaluate predictions derived from each of these models. The first analysis showed that the conversations also contained a small set of pro forma topics that appeared earlier and more frequently than other topics. The second showed that these topics were more likely to be recipient-initiated. These results suggest that reporters deviated from an optimal retrieval plan to take the recipient into account. The results as a whole support a communication-based, “knowledge processing” (Bereiter & Scardomalia, 1980) model of topic selection.