Events 
| CRC Colloquium |
| Montag, 30.06.2008 16:00 - 18:00 | |
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Context Effects in Language Production: Models of Syntactic Priming in Dialogue Corpora David Reitter University of Edinburgh Successful communication depends on the alignment of the interlocutors, that is, they need to be "on the same picture". Pickering & Garrod (2004) have suggested that alignment is based on a cascade of mechanistic repetition effects. In this talk I describe experiments seeking confirmation of this hypothesis by looking at repetition in dialogue corpora and whether repetition is correlated with task success, as well as a cognitive model that shows how priming emerges. I develop two metrics for syntactic adaptation within a speaker and between speakers in dialogue: one for short-term priming effects that decay quickly, and one for long-term adaptation over the course of a dialogue. Both methods estimate adaptation in large data-sets consisting of transcribed human-human dialogue annotated with syntactic information. Two such corpora in English are used: Switchboard, a collection of spontaneous phone conversation, and HCRC Map Task, a set of task-oriented dialogues in which participants describe routes on maps to one another. Map Task provides a measure of task success through the deviance of the communicated routes on the maps. I will present results describing whether there is a link between task success and adaptation. Further evidence points to different cognitive bases for short- and long-term effects. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that semantic activity as the cause of short-term syntactic priming. A model of language production combines syntactic (Combinatory Categorial Grammar, Steedman 2000) and general cognitive frameworks (ACT-R, Anderson 2004). The model operationalizes syntactic decision- making and provides a unified explanation of short- and long-term priming effects. With the model, I argue that short- and long-term adaptation results from a combination of general (base-level) learning and cue-based memory retrieval (spreading activation). http://www.david-reitter.com/ |
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| Contact | |
| contact-person: | Gerhard Jäger |
| homepage: | wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/gja |