Language Use In Conversation Research Articles

Arenas of Language Use

When we think of the ways we use language, we think of face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, reading and writing, and even talking to oneself. These arenas of language use--theaters of action in which people do things with language. But what exactly are they doing with language? What their goals and intentions? By what processes do they achieve these goals? In these twelve essays, Herbert H. Clark and his colleagues discuss the collective nature of language--the ways in which people coordinate with each other to determine the meaning of what they say. According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a common ground of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this common ground from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. Clark also discusses the means by which speakers design their utterances for particular audiences and coordinate their use of language with other participants in a language arena. He argues that language use in conversation is a collaborative process, where speaker and listener work together to establish that the listener understands the speaker's meaning. Since people often use words to mean something quite different from the dictionary definitions of those word, Clark offers a realistic perspective on how speakers and listeners coordinate on the meanings of words. This collection presents outstanding examples of Clark's pioneering work on the pragmatics of language use and it will interest psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers. Herbert H. Clark is professor in the Department of at Stanford University andcoauthor, with E. V. Clark, of Psychology of Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics.

The use of selected theatre rehearsal technique activities with African-American adolescents labeled "behavior disordered".

The extensive literature on the overrepresentation of adolescent African-American male learners in classes for students identified as behavior disordered has essentially not addressed the problems caused by teacher reactions to adolescent conversational language use, the qualitative differences in language choices, or the impact of the conversational choices of adolescents on their educational treatment. This article explores how the dramaturgical perspective of selected Theatre Rehearsal Technique (TRT) activities can be used as learning experiences in communication with this student population. If these students gain quantifiable success in their social communication interactions, reassessment of their special education placement might facilitate their entrance into less restrictive educational environments.

Reeling, Writhing, Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils: Oral Proficiency Interviews as Conversation

This article provides a detailed examination of the oral proficiency interview and its underlying assumptions of validity and value. An attempt is made, by looking at the interview from the inside, to understand what OPIs are and what the participants in them do. The similarities and differences between interviews and conversations are examined, and some of the major problems of proficiency interviewing are illustrated and discussed. Finally, some specific proposals are made that may lead to more effective oral interviewing procedures. In this article I want to look at oral proficiency interviews (OPIs) as instances of conversation between people. Two questions are central to this discussion: (a) Are OPIs examples of conversational language use? and (b) Is conversational language use the appropriate (or the only, or the best) vehicle to evaluate oral proficiency? The tentative answer to the first question is a qualified no, the qualification being that an OPI can and may be designed to elicit conversational language use but frequently is not. The second question is far more difficult to answer: It addresses the central issue of the construct validity of oral tests in general. However, I propose that conversation is an appropriate vehicle for the all-around display of speaking ability in context. If the latter is a definition of oral proficiency, then I think we can be reasonably sure that conversation is the best vehicle for its evaluation. To address the questions I have posed, one must obtain an insider's view of the OPI. To do this, I have relied on three sources of data: (a) the analysis of several OPIs I have taken as an interviewee, (b) the study of transcripts and tapes of a variety of

What Is Computational Psychology?

ly-defined information-processing tasks. With respect to virtually all matters normally studied by psychologists, we cannot identify the basic task. The one possible exception is language-or, rather, parsing. The task of a parsing system is to map the input word-string onto structural descriptions couched in syntactic terms. Syntactic structure enters into our definition of what language is. So whether chimps can learn language is now taken to depend, not on their producing humanoid speech-sounds or new meaningful symbol-strings, but on their ability to make syntactic disThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.254 on Sun, 04 Sep 2016 04:48:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms WHAT IS COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY? 27 criminations. We already have some candidate syntactic descriptions, and (controversial) abstract arguments about the relative power of transformational versus context-free grammars to effect the mapping. We even have one example of an abstract task-identification and a computerized mapping-algorithm based on it, where these are clearly conceived by their authors at distinct explanatory levels. Noam Chomsky's formal grammatical rules do not describe actual psychological processes, but abstract structural relationships. It is often said that Chomsky ignored process because he is a linguist, not a psychologist: psychologists are interested in how language happens in the mind, whereas linguists are concerned only with language in itself. This is true, so far as it goes. But it is sometimes taken to imply that if Chomsky had been really interested in psychology, he would have concentrated on specifying the mental processes involved. This is the typical reaction of computational psychologists (in the broad sense). In Marr's sense, however, Chomsky was doing psychology all along. Indeed, he was attempting the mathematical groundwork on which any scientific process-oriented (second-level) explanation must be based. He was right to ignore process, leaving it to others (such as Mitchell Marcus3) to think about the specific algorithms that could exploit the structural constraints discovered by him. Syntax is a relatively simple case (which is not to deny that it is both difficult and controversial). What of semantics? Attempts to formalise semantics have been made, but are also controversial. We cannot, in general, specify the task involved in mapping a word-string onto a semantic representation. As for mapping an extended text onto its thematic representation, we are even more in the dark. And what structural regularities underlie language-use in conversations? In all these cases, there are scattered insights and a variety of computer-models supposedly directed to the problem. But, in the strong sense discussed within this section, we do not have even the beginnings of a computational understanding of these matters. We are in the same position with respect to most topics S M. P. Marcus, A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.254 on Sun, 04 Sep 2016 04:48:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 28 I-MARGARET A. BODEN studied by psychologists. Even where it is intuitively plausible that a psychological category rests on an identifiable task, we have little idea of what this might be. As Marr put it, when criticizing explanations of problem-solving based on computer simulations of people doing cryptarithmetic: no doubt something computational is going on when we do mental arithmetic, but it almost certainly is not mental arithmetic. Moreover, there may not be one task for each category. Social psychologists offer 'theories' of attitude-change, but it is not obvious that attitudechange is a natural kind. And what of learning, social interaction, or personality development: is it even plausible that an abstract information-processing definition could be given for these phenomena? General arguments of a 'transcendental' character are needed in each case, specifying a generic information-processing task and identifying computational constraints to be exploited by creatures enjoying psychological powers of the relevant class. Philosophical study of the necessary conditions of (for example) conversation, personal interaction, and intentional action in general might be useful, and comparable discussions are to be found in the literature of psychology and AI. But even where such insights exist, they do not have the degree of precision which enabled Marr to prove that his representational system is in principle capable of computing various sorts of 2D-to-3D mapping whereas others are not. He had physics to help him, and physics might allow abstract computational analysis of other low-level sensory systems. It is not obvious, however, that high-level psychological abilities (even including high-level vision) can helpfully be thought of in this way. If they can, then we may hope for a computational psychology that will explain why mental abilities are as they are, by grounding them in general conditions of experience which constrain all psychological beings. But if they cannot, then (nonsensory) computational psychology is possible-if at all-only in a sense weaker than that defined by Marr.