The resolution of ambiguity during conversation: More than mere mimicry?
Jennifer M. Roche, Rick A. C. Dale, Roger J. Kreuz · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2010
Interlocutors often omit important words during conversation, which can lead to miscommunication during ambiguous scenarios (Rayner, Carlson, & Frasyer, 1983).Haywood, Pickering and Branigan (2004) show that under ambiguous situations, listeners are highly sensitive to syntactic primes.The studies reported here evaluated the effects of linguistic and nonlinguistic cues to ambiguity.Experiment 1 implemented a syntactic prime and a visual mistake from a pseudo-confederate to promote disambiguation.Participants were successfully primed to disambiguate their statements during the pseudo-conversation but the visual mistake had no effect.Experiment 2 evaluated the effect of the visual mistake in the absence of a prime during an ambiguous pseudo-conversation.There was a significant effect of visual mistake for participants who believed they were speaking with a real person.Overall, participants did not merely mimic their pseudo-conversation partner's syntactic prime, but perceived other cues to the breakdown in communication to better clarify their own statements.