Perspective-taking in Conversation

群体成员之间的对话是语言使用的一种基本形式。它可能在语言进化过程中发挥了关键作用，并在儿童的语言习得和成人交流中继续发挥重要作用。群体沟通是各种高风险环境的典型，包括课堂教育和商业团队，然而令人惊讶的是，人们对群体沟通成功的原因知之甚少。成功的一个决定因素是在谈话中欣赏他人观点的能力。基本的沟通交流，比如问一个问题，需要计算别人知道些什么。例如，如果你想知道“煤气表在哪里？”这样的问题的答案，首先需要确定谁可能知道答案，以便问合适的人（例如，水管工可能知道，但小孩子不知道）。跟踪谁知道什么也能让我们有效地驾驭社会关系。例如，如果你曾经告诉你的朋友“我儿子六月份要结婚了”，这通常是在传达好消息。如果你对同一个朋友重复同样的信息好几次，这可能是焦虑、不确定或不相信的信号。这个项目研究了人们在交际环境中如何考虑他人的知识和观点，并研究了三人或三人以上的群体之间的对话，每个人都在对话中带来了不同的信念和知识。研究生和本科生将有机会参与实验室研究，来自社区的高中生和老年人将通过社区外展计划参与实验室活动。对话研究的结果不仅可以促进对心理和语言过程的理解，还可以用于改进计算机对话系统（如Siri）。建议的工作使用由主要研究者建立的方法来检查关于交际环境中语言使用的关键开放性问题。该理论认为，对话伙伴充当情境记忆线索，支持语言使用的伙伴特异性。这种人即语境（PAC）的观点被用作一个框架(1)来评估关于支持多方对话中观点采纳机制的候选假设；(2)测试关于伙伴对语言的绑定和对新语境的概括的预测；(3)研究适应如何扩展到多方对话。基于该理论的预测在受众设计和句法适应领域得到了验证。

Conversation among members of a group is a basic form of language use. It likely played a key role as languages evolved and it continues to play important roles in children's language acquisition and adult communication. Group communication is typical of a variety of high-stakes settings, including classroom education and business teams, yet surprisingly little is known about what makes communication in groups successful. One determinant of success is the ability to appreciate the perspective of the other person or people in the conversation. Basic communicative exchanges such as asking a question require calculations about what other people know. For example, if you want to know the answer to a question such as "Where is the gas meter?" it is first necessary to determine who is likely to know the answer in order to ask the appropriate person (e.g., a plumber is likely to know, but a young child is not). Keeping track of who knows what also allows us to navigate social relationships effectively. For example, if you once tell your friend "My son is getting married in June," it is usually communicating good news. If you repeat the same information to the same friend several times, it may instead signal anxiety, uncertainty, or disbelief. This project examines how people take into account the knowledge and perspective of other people in communicative settings and examines conversations among groups of three or more individuals, each of whom brings a different set of beliefs and knowledge to the conversation. Graduate and undergraduate students will have opportunities to participate in laboratory research and high school students and elderly individuals from the community will be involved in laboratory activities through community outreach programs. The results of studies on conversation will not only advance understanding of psychological and linguistic processes but can also be used to advance computer dialog systems (such as Siri). The proposed work uses methods established by the principal investigator to examine key open questions regarding language use in communicative settings. The idea is that conversational partners serve as contextual memory cues, supporting the partner-specificity of language use. This people-as-contexts (PAC) idea is used as a framework (1) to evaluate candidate hypotheses regarding the mechanisms supporting perspective-taking in multiparty conversation; (2) to test predictions concerning the binding of partners to language and generalization to new contexts; and (3) to examine how adaptation scales up to multiparty conversation. Predictions derived from the theory are tested in the domains of audience design and syntactic adaptation.