Abstract
In face-to-face interaction, speakers establish common ground incrementally, the mutual belief of understanding. Instead of constructing “one-shot” complete utterances, speakers tend to package pieces of information in smaller fragments (what Clark calls “installments”). The aim of this paper was to investigate how speakers' fragmented construction of utterances affect the cognitive load of the conversational partners during utterance production and comprehension. In a collaborative furniture assembly, participants instructed each other how to build an IKEA stool. Pupil diameter was measured as an outcome of effort and cognitive processing in the collaborative task. Pupillometry data and eye-gaze behaviour indicated that more cognitive resources were required by speakers to construct fragmented rather than non-fragmented utterances. Such construction of utterances by audience design was associated with higher cognitive load for speakers. We also found that listeners' cognitive resources were decreased in each new speaker utterance, suggesting that speakers' efforts in the fragmented construction of utterances were successful to resolve ambiguities. The results indicated that speaking in fragments is beneficial for minimising collaboration load, however, adapting to listeners is a demanding task. We discuss implications for future empirical research on the design of task-oriented human-robot interactions, and how assistive social robots may benefit from the production of fragmented instructions.
Highlights
Interactive system designers need to better understand social conventions that people use in constructing utterances when structuring their speech in face-to-face interactions
We look at fragmented utterances as a series of contributions to common ground
To understand how fragmented instructions are produced, we examine how speakers’ cognitive resources are allocated during utterance production by analysing the cognitive load of both conversational partners when either fragmented or nonfragmented utterances are constructed
Summary
Interactive system designers need to better understand social conventions that people use in constructing utterances when structuring their speech in face-to-face interactions. It is important to discriminate the fundamental discourse units that coordinate the incremental process of grounding. Researchers have examined grounding behaviour by considering utterance units given boundary signals such as prosodic boundaries and pauses (Traum and Heeman, 1996). Human utterances tend to be informal, contain disfluencies and often they are presented in fragments (Chai et al, 2014). Measuring Collaboration Load With Pupillometry speakers tend to use coordination strategies such as fragmented production of utterances (errors-in-production), to coordinate turns with their listeners and facilitate the process of “coproduction” of utterances. To achieve human-likeness, conversational interfaces may need to embrace such human properties of communication and should succeed in maintaining and coordinating these behaviours with human users
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
