The present study investigated the proactive nature of the human brain in language perception. Specifically, we examined whether early proficient bilinguals can use interlocutor identity as a cue for language prediction, using an event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm. Participants were first familiarized, through video segments, with six novel interlocutors who were either monolingual or bili...

Conversational listener feedback – small verbal/vocal signals such as ‘mhm’, ‘yeah’, ‘huh?’, head gestures, and facial expressions (Allwood et al., 1992) – is an important mechanism in dialogue that enables interlocutors to e›ciently coordinate meaning and understanding. is mechanism could also be important for the interactive coordination between humans and articial conversational agents. In ...

This paper investigates the effect of voice quality in commutative speech. Voice quality is often considered as the characteristic auditory colouring of an individual speaker's voice, but in our study, we find that voice quality can also reveal information about the interlocutor in everyday social interactions. In the correlation analysis between acoustic measures and interlocutors, the effect ...

When people communicate, they coordinate a wide range of linguistic and non-linguistic behaviors. This process of coordination is called alignment, and it is assumed to be fundamental to successful communication. In this paper, we question this assumption and investigate whether disalignment is a more successful strategy in some cases. More specifically, we hypothesize that alignment correlates...

One of the central findings in research on the emergence of communication systems is that interlocutors rapidly converge on a shared set of contracted referring expressions (Krauss and Weinheimer, 1966; Clark, 1996) which become progressively systematized and abstract. This occurs for a wide range of referents, e.g. when referring to spatial locations (Garrod and Doherty, 1994), music (Healey e...

Does the way we interact in conversation changes as we get older? This paper presents a corpus-based study investigating this question by looking into agerelated differences in spontaneous spoken dialogue. Conversations from the Switchboard corpus were analysed using n-gram models, relating the communicative actions as encoded by dialogue acts to speaker age. Results show that older interlocuto...

In this paper, we aim to investigate the coordination of interlocutors behavior in different emotional segments. Conversational coordination between the interlocutors is the tendency of speakers to predict and adjust each other accordingly on an ongoing conversation. In order to find such a coordination, we investigated 1) lexical similarities between the speakers in each emotional segments, 2)...