Partner-Specific Adaptation in Disfluency Processing.

Speakers tend to produce disfluencies when naming unexpected or complex items; in turn, when perceiving disfluency, listeners tend to expect upcoming reference to items that are unexpected or complex to name. In two experiments, we examined if these disfluency-based expectations are routine, or instead, if they adapt to the way the speaker uses disfluency in the current context in a talker-specific manner. Participants listened to instructions to look at objects in contexts with several images, some of which lacked conventional names.

Keeping track of who knows what in multiparty conversation despite severe memory impairment.

Language use has long been understood to be tailored to the intended addressee, a process termed audience design. Audience design is reflected in multiple aspects of language use, including adjustments based on the addressee's knowledge about the topic at hand. In group settings, audience design depends on representations of multiple individuals, each of whom may have different knowledge about the conversational topic.

Mealtime interactions between nursing home staff and residents with dementia: a behavioral analysis of Language characteristics.

Background: Quality staff-resident communication is crucial to promote outcomes in nursing home residents with dementia requiring assistance during mealtimes. Better understanding of staff-resident language characteristics in mealtime interactions help promote effective communication, yet evidence is limited. This study aimed to examine factors associated with language characteristics in staff-resident mealtime interactions.

Video Call Usage in Older Adults With or Without Dementia Impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The usage of video calls for social connection generally increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains unclear, how individuals with dementia (IWD), many of who already experienced isolation in their care settings, use and perceive video calls, what barriers and benefits exist, and how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted their use of video calls. An online survey was conducted to healthy older adults (OA) and people surrounding IWD as proxies.

Alcohol and common ground: The effects of intoxication on linguistic markers of shared understanding during social exchange.

Objective: Most alcohol consumption takes place in social contexts, and the belief that alcohol enhances social interactions has been identified as among the more robust predictors of alcohol use disorder (AUD) development. Yet, we know little of how alcohol affects mental representations of others-what we share and do not share-nor the extent to which intoxication might impact the development of shared understanding (i.e.

Mealtime Interactions between Nursing Home Staff and Residents with Dementia: A Behavioral Analysis of Language Characteristics.

Quality staff-resident communication is crucial to promote outcomes in nursing home residents with dementia requiring assistance during mealtimes. Better understanding of staff-resident language characteristics in mealtime interactions help promote effective communication, yet evidence is limited. This study aimed to examine factors associated with language characteristics in staff-resident mealtime interactions.

Incorporating Functional Response Time Effects into a Signal Detection Theory Model.

Signal detection theory (SDT; Tanner & Swets in Psychological Review 61:401-409, 1954) is a dominant modeling framework used for evaluating the accuracy of diagnostic systems that seek to distinguish signal from noise in psychology. Although the use of response time data in psychometric models has increased in recent years, the incorporation of response time data into SDT models remains a relatively underexplored approach to distinguishing signal from noise. Functional response time effects are hypothesized in SDT models, based on findings from other related psychometric models with response time data.

Detecting Alzheimer's Disease Using Natural Language Processing of Referential Communication Task Transcripts.

Background: People with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often demonstrate difficulties in discourse production. Referential communication tasks (RCTs) are used to examine a speaker's capability to select and verbally code the characteristics of an object in interactive conversation.

Objective: In this study, we used contextualized word representations from Natural language processing (NLP) to evaluate how well RCTs are able to distinguish between people with AD and cognitively healthy older adults.

What are friends for? The impact of friendship on communicative efficiency and cortisol response during collaborative problem solving among younger and older women.

Conversation is a skilled activity that depends on cognitive and social processes, both of which develop through adulthood. We examined the effects of age and partner familiarity on communicative efficiency and cortisol reactivity. Younger and older women interacted with familiar or unfamiliar partners in a dyadic collaborative conversation task (N = 8 in each group).

Referential Form and Memory for the Discourse History.

The way we refer to things in the world is shaped by the immediate physical context as well as the discourse history. But what part of the discourse history is relevant to language use in the present? In four experiments, we combine the study of task-based conversation with measures of recognition memory to examine the role of physical contextual cues that shape what speakers perceive to be a part of the relevant discourse history. Our studies leverage the differentiation effect, a phenomenon in which speakers are more likely to use a modified expression to refer to an object (e.

What's New to You? Preschoolers' Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency.

Speech disfluencies (e.g., "Point to thee um turtle") can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name.

Partner-Specific Communication Deficits in Individuals With Alzheimer's Disease.

Purpose Speakers adjust referential expressions to the listeners' knowledge while communicating, a phenomenon called "audience design." While individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show difficulties in discourse production, it is unclear whether they exhibit preserved partner-specific audience design. The current study examined if individuals with AD demonstrate partner-specific audience design skills.

Standardizing Assessment of Spoken Discourse in Aphasia: A Working Group With Deliverables.

Purpose The heterogeneous nature of measures, methods, and analyses reported in the aphasia spoken discourse literature precludes comparison of outcomes across studies (e.g., meta-analyses) and inhibits replication.

Contextual Integration in Multiparty Audience Design.

Communicating with multiple addressees poses a problem for speakers: Each addressee necessarily comes to the conversation with a different perspective-different knowledge, different beliefs, and a distinct physical context. Despite the ubiquity of multiparty conversation in everyday life, little is known about the processes by which speakers design language in multiparty conversation. While prior evidence demonstrates that speakers design utterances to accommodate addressee knowledge in multiparty conversation, it is unknown if and how speakers encode and combine different types of perspective information.

Audience Design in Multiparty Conversation.

How do speakers design what they say in order to communicate effectively with groups of addressees who vary in their background knowledge of the topic at hand? Prior findings indicate that when a speaker addresses a pair of listeners with discrepant knowledge, that speakers Aim Low, designing their utterances for the least knowledgeable of the two addressees. Here, we test the hypothesis that speakers will depart from an Aim Low approach in order to efficiently communicate with larger groups of interacting partners. Further, we ask whether the cognitive demands of tracking multiple conversational partners' perspectives places limitations on successful audience design.

Evidence of preserved audience design with aging in interactive conversation.

Speakers tailor referential expressions to the listener's knowledge, a phenomenon called . Audience design requires access to partner-specific representations in memory, which could be compromised among older adults who experience memory declines. In fact, little is known about how the memory representation of shared knowledge with a conversational partner influences audience design in multiparty conversation.

Learning and using knowledge about what other people do and don't know despite amnesia.

Successful communication requires keeping track of what other people do and do not know, and how this differs from our own knowledge. Here we ask how knowledge of what others know is stored in memory. We take a neuropsychological approach, comparing healthy adults to patients with severe declarative memory impairment (amnesia).

The historical context in conversation: Lexical differentiation and memory for the discourse history.

When designing a definite referring expression, speakers take into account both the local context and certain aspects of the historical context, including whether similar referents have been mentioned in the past. When a similar item has been mentioned previously, speakers tend to elaborate their referring expression in order to differentiate the two items, a phenomenon called lexical differentiation. The present research examines the locus of the lexical differentiation effect and its relationship with memory for the discourse.

Adjusting conceptual pacts in three-party conversation.

During conversation, partners develop representations of jointly known information--the common ground--and use this knowledge to guide subsequent linguistic exchanges. Extensive research on 2-party conversation has offered key insights into this process, in particular, its partner-specificity: Common ground that is shared with 1 partner is not always assumed to be shared with other partners. Conversation often involves multiple pairs of individuals who differ in common ground.

What is the context of prediction?

We agree with Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) claim that theories of language processing must address the interconnection of language production and comprehension. However, we have two concerns: First, the central notion of context when predicting what another person will say is underspecified. Second, it is not clear that P&G's dual-mechanism model captures the data better than a single-mechanism model would.

Influence of perspective and goals on reference production in conversation.

We examined the extent to which speakers take into consideration the addressee's perspective in language production. Previous research on this process had revealed clear deficits (Horton & Keysar, Cognition 59:91-117, 1996; Wardlow Lane & Ferreira, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 34:1466-1481, 2008). Here, we evaluated a new hypothesis--that the relevance of the addressee's perspective depends on the speaker's goals.