The Distribution of Repair in Dialogue

The Distribution of Repair in Dialogue Marcus Colman and Patrick G.T. Healey {marcus,ph}@eecs.qmul. ac.uk Queen Mary, University of London, Interaction, Media and Communication Research Group, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, London E1 4NS UK Abstract Repairs –the various ways in which people edit and reformulate conversational turns– are a characteristic feature of natural dialogue. However, relatively little is known about their overall frequency or distribution in conversation. We present a systematic, quantitative study of patterns of repair in two corpora: ‘ordinary’ dialogues from the British National Corpus (BNC) and task-oriented dialogues from the HCRC Map Task. We use this analysis to evaluate three hypotheses about patterns of repair 1) social ‘preferences’ 2) processing demands and 3) dialogue co-ordination. The results show that repair is more frequent in task-oriented dialogue, that use of repair is broadly unaffected by familiarity or mode of interaction but substantially affected by task roles. We argue that the complimentary patterns of repair used by conversational partners support the view of repairs as an integrated, cross-turn and cross-person, system for sustaining the mutual-intelligibility of dialogue. Keywords: Communication; Dialogue; Repair; Conversation Analysis. Introduction Models of human communication in the cognitive sciences often idealise to a situation in which people are assumed to ‘speak the same language’ i.e. are assumed to be linguistically transparent to one another. However, in practice, “no two speakers of the same language ever speak exactly the same dialect of that language” (Fodor and Lepore, 1992, p.10). Dialogue always proceeds against a background of idiolect differences. Place of residence, cultural group, hobbies, occupation, education and age group all feed into differences in the way we use language (e.g., Clark; 1996). Detecting and dealing with differences in interpretation is thus a recurrent and routine problem in conversation. Conversation analysts have described a structured set of repair mechanisms that people can use to signal problems, or possible problems, with interpretation (e.g. Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, 1977; Schegloff, 1987, 1992). The conversation analytic (CA) repair structures are built around three main points a) initiation: who signals a problem - whether it is the speaker of a problem turn (‘self ’) or a recipient of it (‘other’) b) repair: who actually makes a change to the problem turn (self or other) c) position: where in the conversational sequence these events occur; in the same turn as the problem, in the turn after the problem turn or in some subsequent turn. The different possible trajectories from each potential ‘problem’ turn, through the initiation of a repair to its completion are part of an integrated repair ‘space’ that spans multiple turns and multiple participants (Schegloff 1992). This paper addresses two basic questions about the structure of this repair space: 1. What is the typical distribution of repair in this space? 2. What factors explain this distribution? The first question is about quantifying the distribution of different repair types. It has not, to our knowledge previously been addressed (although some studies have looked at the distribution of within-turn repairs e.g. Bortfeld, et al. 2001; Lickley and Bard, 1998). This gap is partly because CA focuses on the particular sequential consequences of repair in specific cases, not statistical distributions. 1 The second question is about the kinds of explanation offered for the distribution of repairs. We identify three broad, non-exclusive, hypotheses. Hypothesis 1. Social Preference: In CA, the structure of the repair space is primarily explained in terms of ‘preference’; what a competent speaker might consider to be conversationally or socially appropriate. This leads to an ordering of different repair trajectories such that self- initiation is preferred over other-initiation and self-repair over other-repair (see examples below). This preference hierarchy operates independently of the type of conversational task or type of problem encountered (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks, 1977). Hypothesis 2. Processing Demands: Repair phenomena may also be a side-effect of the difficulty of producing or comprehending language because of processing load. For example, Clark and Wasow (1998) show that self-repairs are more likely where people are producing more complex constituents. Most of the experimental evidence for this applies to first position self-repairs such as repeats and restarts (e.g. Branigan et al, 1999; Lickley and Bard, 1998) but could be generalized to at least some aspects of other forms. For example, the delay and markers that often precede a third position repair might simply reflect In fact, Schegloff (1993) specifically argues that CA phenomena are not suitable for quantitative analysis. For example, counting the frequency of occurrences of “what? ”, obscures differences in the complex variety of things that “what? ” can be used to do in conversation (see Drew, 1997). This is true but it does not preclude the possibility that useful generalizations can be made by looking at the overall distribution of ‘whats’. We also note that repair is unusual in that it can occur freely in any context, unlike e.g. laughter or sobbing (c.f. Schgeloff, 1993).