Processing Conversational Utterances

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Conversation is the most basic site for language use; it is the primary site for language acquisition and most likely the context within which language emerged. Despite its fundamental importance, research on the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of conversational utterances has remained relatively rare. Instead, past empirical research has focused primarily on how readers comprehend and remember narrative or expository text. However, conversations differ from texts in fundamental ways, and understanding how people process conversational contributions will require attention to these differences. This research program is an attempt to contribute to our understanding of the social-cognitive processes involved in conversation comprehension. This will be accomplished by focusing on conversational utterances as intention-based, interpersonal, collaborative acts and examining how these acts are produced and understood. A series of experiments employing a variety of measures (reading times, interpretation speed, memory) will be conducted to examine how, and in what way, people comprehend and remember the actions that speakers perform with their conversation turns. An important aspect of this research will be the development of a method for examining participants' (rather than observers') on-line processing of their conversations. This will be accomplished with the development of an artificial conversation agent that can simulate human language use.