Communication and Conversation

Question 1

In order to have a conversation and be able to communicate, our brains have to perceive, understand, infer and coordinate language.

Language is very complex!

But how does the brain manages it all?

Answer 1

Many researchers agree on the proposal that the brain is specifically made to learn and understand language.

Actually, a big portion of the brain is dedicated to language:

Question 2

What can parents do to improve the babies’ language development and language skills?

Answer 2

When a parent answers a baby’s babbling, the baby starts learning the different conversational cues.

Moreover, talking directly to toddlers also improve their language skills.

Question 3

Overregularization Errors

Answer 3

Overregularization errors occur when children start going to school and start learning formally syntax rules. These new rules might interfere with what was previously learned and my lead children to syntax mistakes.

For example, a child might have learn to say “ran”, but once they learn in school that the past tense of the verbs end in “ed” for most of them, the child might start saying “runed”

Question 4

So how did children learn the syntax correctly before school?

Answer 4

Actually, parents rarely reward good syntax or correct the mistakes and when a correction is made, children frequently disregard it. What actually happens is that the children look at how the parents react and this tells them if they are using language correctly or not.

This is called learned from effective communication.

Question 5

True or False

Language can influence our thoughts and the way we structure them.

Answer 5

True.

There was this experiment where people were shown a shade of blue and then two other shades of blue. Participants were then asked which of the two belongs to the same category as the first one.

Russian speakers were found to take longer RT since in their language they have two different words for a set of different shades of blue.

Question 6

You can think of communication in two ways

Answer 6

• Speech
• Conversation

Question 7

Structure of a conversation

Answer 7

• There are openings and closings
• Turn-taking behaviour
• Unknowingly we negotiate topics

Question 8

Adjacency Pairs

Answer 8

These are utterances that occur together:

• Information exchange
• Greetings
• Farewells
• Offers
• Apologies
• Openings
• Closings

Question 9

Common Ground in Conversation

Answer 9

The mutual knowledge, beliefs and assumptions we have about previous conversations, perceptual experiences or just experience with a particular cultural community.

Question 10

Conversation Repair

Answer 10

Conversation repair happens when we don’t have the same common ground as our conversation partner and we have to put together what they mean.

Question 11

Turn-taking

Answer 11

Collaborative back and forth between partners.

The first ones to look into this were Sacks et al. and they proposed the rules of turn-taking behaviour:

• The current speaker pick the next speaker
• If the current speaker does not do this, someone else can speak
• The current speaker can continue but does not have to

Question 12

Turn Yielding Signals

Answer 12

• Pitch drop
• Drawl on the last syllable
• Termination of hand gesture
• Volume drop
• Complete sentences
• Stereotyped expressions
• Direct gaze

Question 13

Turn Suppress Signals

Answer 13

• Filled pauses
• Continued hand gestures
• Looking away

Question 14

Demands in Conversation

Answer 14

• Informational demand
• Discourse records
• Mental model
• Intonation units
• Procedural demands
• Unpredictability

Question 15

Gestures

Answer 15

• Beat gestures
• Metaphorical gestures
• Iconic gestures

Question 16

Why do we do gestures?

Answer 16

Gestures may be automatic! But we also may use gestures for the retrieval of a memory, or to help our audience understand better the message conveyed. by providing more information regarding the intended meaning.

Question 17

Back channelling

Answer 17

Responses from the listener that shows that they are invested into the conversation. They might do this by nodding their head, saying “hmm”, “ok”, “yeah”, etc.

Question 18

Mechanisms involved in Conversations

Answer 18

• Interactive or Behavioural Alignment: We become similar to our conversational partner
• Syntactic Alignment: We adopt the sentence structure as our conversational partner. For example, in an experiment, a person would read a sentence such as “The girl gave the book to the boy.” Another person would then look for the image associated with the sentence. Then, this same person would have to pick another image and say the action illustrated. The person would say something like: “The father brought his daughter a present”. Thus, taking the same structure as the first person.

Question 19

Why do alignment with our conversational partner?

Answer 19

Alignment helps the listener to understand what we are saying without using many resources.

Question 20

Movement coordination

Answer 20

We are attuned to match non-verbal behaviour.

This was tested through an optical flow which allowed you to measure movement in a video clip. In this experiment, they wanted to see how much movement coordination differed from a conversation between two friends and two strangers. The results showed that there was not a big difference!