Computer-mediated Conversations Research Articles

Backchannels in video-mediated ELF conversations: a case study

Abstract There are few studies on backchannels in ELF and none concerns computer-mediated conversations. Backchannelling has been associated with good listenership and enhanced cooperativeness, an intrinsic feature of ELF. They would also play a key role in computer-mediated communication, maintaining a sense of affective equilibrium among participants and compensating for medium-related limitations. We analyze backchanneling in an ELF conversation between a Spanish female and a German male student from the Corpus of Video-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Conversations (ViMELF). Backchanneling seems to be particularly intense in the opening and closing sections of the exchange, where interpersonal work is the most needed. While significant idiolectal differences are observed between the two participants, both show a marked preference for and a tendency to concentrate realizations on a few weak backchanneling forms, conferring the exchange a general impression of monotony and emotional flatness. Some backchanneling features in the exchange may be described as typical of ELF: backchannels tend to occur in moments when speakers sense that understanding may be compromised and are frequently complemented by supportive material reinforcing the speaker’s point. The analysis also reveals some characteristic awkward usage, with tokens which are clearly “overdone,” while others are too weak and disappointing or behave disruptively by occurring in unexpected positions and interrupting the flow of the conversation. Research on ELF video conversations is particularly timely given the recent surge in videoconferencing propitiated by the COVID pandemic, a tendency which is likely to stay in post-pandemic times.

The (better than expected) consequences of asking sensitive questions

Within a conversation, individuals balance competing objectives, such as the motive to gather information and the motive to create a favorable impression. Across five experimental studies (N = 1427), we show that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions because they believe that asking sensitive questions will make their conversational partners uncomfortable and cause them to form negative perceptions. We introduce the Communication Motives and Expectations Model and we demonstrate that the aversion to asking sensitive questions is often misguided. Question askers systematically overestimate the impression management and interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions. In conversations with friends and with strangers and in both face-to-face and computer-mediated conversations, respondents formed similarly favorable impressions of conversational partners who asked sensitive questions (e.g., “How much is your salary?”) as they did of conversational partners who asked non-sensitive questions (e.g., “How do you get to work?”). We assert that individuals make a potentially costly mistake when they avoid asking sensitive questions, as they overestimate the interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions.

Has nigga Been Reappropriated as a Term of Endearment?

It is commonly believed that nigga has been reappropriated as a term of endearment. Perhaps this perception persists incorrectly because public conversations on this word are often dominated by nonlinguists. In contrast, linguists lack comparative studies of nigga’s historical and modern-day use. Addressing this misperception requires a multilayered approach, employed here. This study begins with a qualitative inquiry into the historical, linguistic, and social factors that have fueled the current perception of the nigger/nigga two-word dichotomy and of how nigga was used by blacks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part is a quantitative study that examines the current apportionment of nigga by speaker race and gender, and linguistic context, as observed in computer-mediated conversations. Multivariate analysis reveals differences among black and white speakers, males and females, and in various linguistic contexts. Comparative analysis uncovers that many of nigga’s current meanings, referents, and uses have existed since at least the nineteenth century and that any changes to the meanings occurred gradually and not through abrupt reanalysis. This fnding lends no support to the reappropriation hypothesis. And crucially, the data show that the epitomized example of reappropriation, my nigga, does not function primarily as a genuine term of endearment but as a masculinizing marker of social identity.

I Didn’t Want to Offend You: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions

Within a conversation, individuals balance competing concerns, such as the motive to gather information and the motives to avoid discomfort and to create a favorable impression. Across three pilot studies and four experimental studies, we demonstrate that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions, because they fear making others uncomfortable and because of impression management concerns. We demonstrate that this aversion to asking sensitive questions is both costly and misguided. Even when we incentivized participants to ask sensitive questions, participants were reluctant to do so in both face-to-face and computer-mediated chat conversations. Interestingly, rather than accurately anticipating how sensitive questions will influence impression formation, we find that question askers significantly overestimate the interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions. Across our studies, individuals formed similarly favorable impressions of partners who asked non-sensitive (e.g., “Are you a morning person?”) and sensitive (e.g., “What are your views on abortion?”) questions, despite askers’ reticence to ask sensitive questions.

Older children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders can comprehend verbal irony in computer-mediated communication

We compared the comprehension of verbal irony presented in computer-mediated conversations for older children and adolescents with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) and typically developing (TD) controls. We also determined whether participants’ interpretations of irony were affected by the relationship between characters in the interactions. Participants role-played as addressees in computer-mediated conversations that contained ironic and literal remarks made by speakers and that varied according to the speaker's relationship with the addressee: a same-aged friend, an older relative, or no relationship information. Children and adolescents with HFASD were just as accurate as TD controls in comprehending ironic criticisms and in judging the speaker's intentions to criticize and to convey humor. Both participant groups considered the speaker's relationship with the addressee in their attributions of the ironic speaker's belief but not the speaker's intentions to convey criticism or humor. Unlike TD controls who commented on the context when typing their initial thoughts, participants with HFASD provided no response. The two groups, however, provided similarly themed typed responses for both ironic criticisms and literal compliments. We suggest that tasks which impose minimal social and verbal demands offer a promising way to assess pragmatic abilities in individuals with HFASD.

Online conversations: a sociolinguistic investigation into young adults’ use of videochats

Conversation, the social and socialising activity par excellence, has undergone a profound semiotic and phenomenological transformation in the contemporary age. Broadly speaking, conversation used to be associated with speech and a shared context of situation in many linguistic approaches (e.g., conversation analysis), but computer-mediated conversation (e.g., videochat) challenges well-established notions of what a conversation actually is. How is conversation modified by the use of digital technologies? To what extent is a computer-mediated conversation different from a face-to-face conversation? What degree of awareness do young adults possess as regards the communicative affordances that computer-mediated conversations allow? Can videochats be successfully used in and outside class and how? This paper sets out to highlight the fundamental role of conversation as a social and socialising activity and to illustrate from a theoretical standpoint some of its contemporary technologically constrained modifications, such as those present in computer-mediated conversations. Our aim is also to present data collected through a sociolinguistic research carried out between 2009 and 2010. Questionnaires, structured and semi-structured interviews were administered to a sample of 100 English-speaking high school and university students. The project was focused on how young adults (15–20 years old) engage with video conversations, with specific reference to the combined use of speech and writing in videochats. Significant alterations in conversational patterns in videochats are outlined and discussed, taking into account specific features. We also contend that such findings encourage applications in the field of foreign language learning and teaching.

Verbal Irony Use in Face-To-Face and Computer-Mediated Conversations

Speakers use a range of cues to signal ironic intent, including cues based on contrast with context, verbal, and paralinguistic cues. Speakers also rely on cues provided by addressees regarding comprehension of irony. When such cues are unavailable, speakers may be less willing to use irony because of the risk of miscommunication, and addressees may be more likely to misinterpret irony. The present study tested these hypotheses by examining the production and comprehension of irony in multimodal (face-to-face) and unimodal (computer-mediated) conversations. Contrary to expectations, speakers in the computer condition used more irony than face-to-face speakers. Comprehension of irony did not appear to differ across settings, although addressees in the computer condition provided less feedback (positive or negative) to their partners about their comprehension. These surprising results are discussed in terms of possible differences in the discourse goals and relational strategies engendered by computer-mediated and face-to-face communicative settings.

Gender, Ethnicity, and Classroom Discourse

Ethnic and gender differences in classroom conversational styles are explored by comparing student involvement in face-to-face and computer-mediated discussions. The quantity of participation in these two environments is triangulated with student perceptions of the conversations in three undergraduate composition classrooms. White males participated more frequently than other groups in the face-to-face setting, and White women appeared to benefit more than other groups from conversations held in the computer-mediated setting. However, these gender-differentiated participation patterns did not apply to the discourse patterns of Hispanic males and females. Unlike their White female peers, the Hispanic women in this study participated frequently in the face-to-face conversations, spoke more than Hispanic males, and generally disliked the computer-mediated conversations.

Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

1. Foreword 2. Introduction 3. I. Linguistic Perspectives 4. Electronic Language: A new variety of English (by Collot, Milena) 5. Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer conferencing (by Yates, Simeon J.) 6. Linguistic and interactional features of Internet Relay Chat (by Werry, Christopher C.) 7. Functional comparisons of face-to-face and computer-mediated decision making interactions (by Condon, Sherri L.) 8. Two variants of an electronic message schema (by Herring, Susan C.) 9. II. Social and Ethical Perspectives 10. Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities (by Kollock, Peter) 11. Our passionate response to virtual reality (by Deuel, Nancy R.) 12. Cyberfeminism (by Hall, Kira) 13. III. Cross-Cultural Perspectives 14. Computer-mediated conversations as a new dimension of intercultural communication between East Asian and North American college students (by Ma, Ringo) 15. Perceptions of American culture: The impact of an electronically-mediated cultural exchange program on Mexican high school students (by Meagher, Mary Elaine) 16. Visible conversation and academic inquiry: CMC in a culturally diverse classroom (by Golomb, Gregory G.) 17. IV. CMC and group Interaction 18. Group dynamics in an e-mail forum (by Korenman, Joan) 19. Writing to work: How using e-mail can reflect technological and organizational change (by Ziv, Oren) 20. The rhetorical dynamics of a community protest in cyberspace: What happened with Lotus Marketplace (by Gurak, Laura J.) 21. References 22. Index of names 23. Index of subjects

Social interaction on the net

The phrase virtual community is often used to describe long term, computer-mediated conversations amongst large groups. This paper suggests that such conversations may be better viewed as instances of a participatory genre, rather than as community. A genre-oriented analysis is useful because it encourages a focus on the medium within which the discourse is embodied. As an example we analyze an on-line conversation from the perspective of genre: we identify its communicative purpose, regularities of form and substance (such as word play and affirmation), and the situation which gives rise to these regularities. We then examine ways in which the discourse medium supports these regularities and enables participants to establish and reinforce the conversation's underlying conventions. More generally, we believe that genre-oriented analyses such as this can play an important role in the design of participatory media.