The Role of Feedback in Aligning Perspectives in Referential Communication

The Role of Feedback in Aligning Perspectives in Referential Communication Timothy M. Gann (tgann@ucmerced.edu) Sierra Nevada Research Institute and Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced 5200 North Lake Rd. Merced, CA 95343 USA Abstract Similarly, in a referential communication context involving perspective taking, as time passes and socially emergent cat- egories become more dominant, attention should shift away from privileged competitors. By the end of a conversation they should be attended to about as little as an object unre- lated to the target. This shift should also happen in situations in which the speaker does not initially have access to what the listener knows. As evidence about listener’s knowledge, or lack of knowledge, becomes available they should gradu- ally begin to focus on the stimuli that are most consistent with the listener’s perspective. The question then becomes, what factors influence the rate of learning during conversation? One possibility is the poten- tial for feedback. Closely related to feedback are the roles of the interlocutors: Are they in a didactic situation in which the roles are fixed, or is it a fully interactive dialogue in which there is turn taking? Unrestricted feedback can come in many forms. First, speakers can receive pragmatic feedback in the form of knowledge about the success or failure of the listener in establishing joint attention to a target object. It is implic- itly accepted that pragmatic feedback is necessary for learn- ing to happen, with positive feedback leading to a reinforce- ment of the speaker’s current conceptualization, and negative feedback encouraging re-conceptualization. Second, the lis- tener can give signals to the speaker, who can make infer- ences about the listeners confidence about an interpretation. For example, Barr (2003) found that listeners will use speak- ers’ confidence as a cue that the current referent is either a typical or atypical member of a category. In principle, speak- ers should also similarly use the listener’s confidence in their selection of a target as a cue to how well their message was received. Finally, listeners can give direct verbal feedback to the speaker. Schober and Clark (1989) conducted an experiment in which a participant acted as a non-interactive observer to a conversation. This participant attempted to do the same task the actual listener was doing, but without the ability to give feedback to the speaker.They found that the observers never aligned as closely to the speaker because they were unable to provide feedback and have the speaker adjust to or correct their interpretations. The lack of verbal feedback can also make the speakers prone to give more information as a hedge against possible misunderstandings (Gann & Barr, 2012). For example, Krauss and Weinheimer (1966) found that when lis- teners were unable to give feedback, speakers were not in- clined to simplify their utterances.Instead they kept utterances long so they could minimize the possibility of giving too lit- tle information. While it is possible for alignment to happen without it, direct verbal feedback likely serves to speed up the Successful dialogue frequently requires that interlocutors con- struct and align their conceptualizations of referents. This study presents data from a referential communication exper- iment the manipulates contextual factors such as the availabil- ity of feedback and role constancy in order to investigate how conversational partners reconcile their perspectives in the face of mutual uncertainty about what constitutes common ground. The results show that speakers tend to incorporate informa- tion about the addressee’s perspective, and that this informa- tion tends to come through direct feedback rather than through indirect channels such as turn-taking. Keywords: Psycholinguistics; language production; audience design; perspective taking. Introduction When deciding how to describe an object, people must first categorize it in a way that is useful to themselves them and ultimately for their partners. Sometimes, the taxonomic, es- tablished categorization is not well suited to the task and in- terlocutors may be forced to develop an ad hoc, or socially emergent category that is more suited to achieving their cur- rent conversational goals (Barr & Kronm¨uller, 2007; Barsa- lou, 1991). For example, when two people are discussing where they wish to go out to eat, they may form a category of acceptable restaurants on the spot. This category emerges over the conversation and is neither pre-existing in memory nor particularly enduring (unless they frequently go out to- gether). This socially emergent conceptualization then be- comes the foundation for future exchanges. What this means is that early on in a conversation, taxonomic categories are going to be activated more often and attract more attention. However, as time goes by and speakers learn to put more em- phasis on shared information, and other types of information are found to be in conflict with the goal of successfully refer- ring to an object, the socially constructed categories should be used more often. These socially emergent categories would probably demonstrate some degree of being person-specific (Horton & Gerrig, 2005), but that would not preclude their activation and propagation to new conversational partners if they were useful (Garrod & Doherty, 1994). The development of new conceptualizations during conver- sation should also lead to changes in how attention is allo- cated. Rehder and Hoffman (2005) conducted an experiment in which participants had to do a category learning task while having their eyes tracked. At the beginning of the experiment, participants would overtly attend to each of the features in the display and consider them all before making a decision. By the end of the experiment, participants learned to overtly at- tend only to those features that were necessary for the task of choosing which category was represented by the display.