Information about audiences influence how speakers produce messages, biasing speakers’ own later recall (Higgins & Rholes, 1978), contingent on the creation of a shared reality between interlocutors (Echterhoff, Higgins, & Rholes, 2005). We tested for a similar effect within third party dialogue comprehension, in which overheard addressees displayed evaluative backchannel responses. Participant...

This paper was set out to investigate the main cultural differences between Saudi and British participants making apologies with a focus on the role of the gender of the addressee in the selection of apology strategies in gender-segregated vs. coed societies. Written questionnaires were used to collect data from 80 participants: 20 Saudi males, 20 Saudi females, 20 British males and 20 British ...

This extended abstract outlines a new study that investigates spatial language for use in human-robot communication. The scenario studied is a home setting in which the elderly resident has misplaced an object, such as eyeglasses, and the robot will help the resident find the object. We present preliminary results from the initial study in which we investigate spatial language generated to a hu...

Understanding the communicative intention of a speaker is the ultimate goal of language comprehension. Yet, there is very little computational work on this topic. In this chapter a general cognitive plausible model of how an addressee can understand communicative intentions is presented in mathematical detail. The key mechanism of the model is simulated role-reversal of the addressee with the s...

Successful communication depends in part on an ability to anticipate miscommunication. We investigated speakers' ability to gauge their addressees' understanding. Participants in our experiments were asked to say ambiguous sentences while attempting to convey a specific intention to their addressee. When they estimated the addressee's understanding of the intended meaning, they showed a consist...

We investigated 14-month-old infants' expectations toward a third party addressee of communicative gestures and an instrumental action. Infants' eye movements were tracked as they observed a person (the Gesturer) point, direct a palm-up request gesture, or reach toward an object, and another person (the Addressee) respond by grasping it. Infants' looking patterns indicate that when the Gesturer...

Feedback is not an individual behavior or skill; it is part of the collaborative process of grounding in which speaker and addressee coordinate their contributions to ensure mutual understanding. Based on our microanalysis of psychotherapy and experimental videos, we propose that grounding is a threestep process of observable behaviors, with traditional backchannels in the middle: The speaker p...

When an addressee is the reference object predicated by a spatial term, does a speaker’s assumption that the reference object is the addressee influence the speaker’s comprehension of spatial terms? This study examined this point by using four Japanese spatial terms. Results indicated that such an assumption biased and changed the boundary defined by the spatial terms and that this bias might b...

We report two experiments that investigated the widely held assumption that speakers use the addressee's discourse model when choosing referring expressions (e.g., Ariel, 1990; Chafe, 1994; Givón, 1983; Prince, 1985), by manipulating whether the addressee could hear the immediately preceding linguistic context. Experiment 1 showed that speakers increased pronoun use (and decreased noun phrase u...