Abstract
Speaker adaptation in dialogues appears to support not only dialogue coordination, but also language processing, learning and in/out-group manifestation. Presumably, speakers in various stages of their language development might exploit different functions and types of adaptation, but conclusive research in this area has so far been lacking. In the present study, we compare structural, lexical and prosodic adaptation in a semi-natural dialogue across two age groups, in adult-child and adult-adult dyads. The results of our experiments indicate that children take over the structural and lexical forms used by their dialogue partner more frequently than adults. Children also adapt to the pitch of the speaker they interact with more than adult participants. Irrespective of age, we found longer onset latencies following the experimenter’s question if the question had a non-canonical (declarative) form compared to a question with a canonical (interrogative) form. This can be seen as a manifestation of a processing advantage typically associated with the long-term effects of adaptation-as-learning.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Garrod, S., Anderson, A.: Saying What You Mean in Dialogue: A Study in Conceptual and Semantic Coordination. Cognition 27, 181–218 (1987)
Metzing, C., Brennan, S.E.: When Conceptual Pacts Are Broken: Partner-Specific Effects on the Comprehension of Referring Expressions. Journal of Memory and Language 49, 237–246 (2003)
Garrod, S., Doherty, G.: Conversation, Co-Ordination, and Convention: An Empirical Investigation of How Groups Establish Linguistic Conventions. Cognition 53, 181–215 (1994)
Branigan, H.P., Pickering, M.J., Pearson, J., McLean, J.F.: Linguistic Alignment Between People and Computers. Journal of Pragmatics (2008)
Levelt, W.J.M., Kelter, S.: Surface Form and Memory in Question Answering. Cognitive Psychology 14, 78–106 (1982)
Bock, K.: SyntactIC Persistence in Language Production. Cognitive Psychology 18, 355–387 (1986)
Pickering, M.J., Branigan, H.P.: Syntactic Priming in Language Production. Trends in Cognitive Science 3, 136–141 (1999)
Gries, S.T.: Syntactic Priming: A Corpus-Based Approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34, 365–399 (2005)
Liberman, P.: Intonation, Perception, and Language. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1967)
Nilsenová, M., Swerts, M.G.J., Houtepen, V., Dittrich, H.: Pitch Adaptation in Different Age Groups: Boundary Tones versus Global Pitch. In: Proceedings of Interspeech, Brighton, September 6-10 (2009)
Natale, M.: Converge of Mean Vocal Intensity in Dyadic Communication as a Function of Social Desirability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, 790–804 (1975)
Gregory, S.W., Hoyt, B.R.: Conversation Partner Mutual Adaptation as Demonstrated by Fourier Series Analysis. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 11, 35–46 (1982)
Giles, H., Coupland, N., Coupland, J.: Accommodation Theory: Communication, Context, and Consequence. In: Giles, H., Coupland, J., Coupland, N. (eds.) Contexts of Accommodation, pp. 1–68 (1991)
Gregory, S.W., Gallagher, T.J.: Spectral Analysis of Candidates’ Nonverbal Communication: Predicting U.S. Presidential Election Outcomes. Social Psychology Quarterly 49, 237–246 (2002)
Pardo, J.S.: On Phonetic Convergence during Conversational Interaction. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119, 2382–2393 (2006)
Delvaux, V., Soquet, A.: The Influence of Ambient Speech on Adult Speech Productions through Unintentional Imitation. Phonetica 64, 145–173 (2007)
Goldinger, S.D.: Perception and Production in an Episodic Lexicon. In: Johnson, K., Mullennix, J. (eds.) Talker Variability in Speech Processing, pp. 33–66. Academic Press, San Diego (1997)
Goldinger, S.D.: Echoes of Echoes? An Episodic Theory of Lexical Access. Psychological Review 105, 251–279 (1998)
Goldinger, S.D., Azuma, T.: Puzzle-Solving Science: the Quixotic Quest for Units in Speech Perception. Journal of Phonetics 31, 305–320 (2003)
Namy, L.L., Nygaard, L.C., Sauterberg, D.: Gender Differences in Vocal Accommodation: the Role of Perception. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21, 422–432 (2002)
Babel, M.E.: Phonetic and Social Selectivity in Speech Accommodation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (2009)
Nilsenová, M., van Amelsvoort, M.A.A.: Syntactic Boost Effects on Phonological Priming in Dutch. Ms., University of Tilburg (2010)
Branigan, H.P., Pickering, M.J., Cleland, A.A.: Syntactic Coordination in Dialogue. Cognition 75, B13–B25 (2007)
Hartsuiker, R.J., Bernolet, S., Schoonbaert, S., Speybroeck, S., Vanderelst, D.: Syntactic Priming Persists while the Lexical Boost Decays: Evidence from Written and Spoken Dialogue. Journal of Memory and Language 58, 214–238 (2008)
Pickering, M., Garrod, S.: Toward a Mechanistic Psychology of Dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, 169–226 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Nilsenová, M., Nolting, P. (2010). Linguistic Adaptation in Semi-natural Dialogues: Age Comparison. In: Sojka, P., Horák, A., Kopeček, I., Pala, K. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6231. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15760-8_67
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15760-8_67
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15759-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15760-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)