Alignment of Reference Frames in Dialogue

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

Previous research has shown that interlocutors in a dialogue align their utterances at several levels of representation. This paper reports two experiments that use a confederate-priming paradigm to examine whether interlocutors also align their spatial representations during dialogue. Experiment 1 showed a significant reference frame priming effect: Speakers tended to use the same reference frame to locate an object in a scene as the frame that they had just heard their interlocutor use. Experiment 2 demonstrated the same pattern even when the speaker's description and their partner's previous description involved different prepositions. Hence the effect cannot be explained in terms of lexical priming of a particular preposition. Our results are strong evidence that interlocutors in a dialogue align non-linguistic as well as linguistic representations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
EditorsK Forbus, D Gentner, T Regier
Place of PublicationMahwah
PublisherLawrence Erlbaum Associates
Pages1434-1439
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)978-0-8058-5464-0
Publication statusPublished - 2005

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • CONVERSATION
  • COORDINATION
  • SPEAKERS

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