susan dot brennan you-know-what sunysb dot edu
Title:
Adapting to Partners in Dialogue
Abtract:
In spoken conversation, people coordinate their linguistic choices and nonverbal behavior. In doing so, they adapt to their partners. Often this results in convergence of word choice, conceptual perspective, syntactic form, dialect, speaking rate, and nonverbal behavior. Such adjustments have been termed audience design when the adapting is done by speakers; the adapting may also done by addressees, who interpret an utterance differently depending on who speaks it. Recent debates have centered on whether (and when) partner-specific adjustments can emerge rapidly and automatically in the language processing architecture, or alternatively, whether they emerge relatively late, essentially as repairs. I will survey the evidence about partner-specific adjustments within several levels of linguistic processing, present some new evidence, and then consider how best to account for this evidence.
About the speaker:
Susan Brennan holds joint appointments in Psychology and Computer
Science at Stony Brook and is also affiliated with the Department of
Linguistics. She uses behavioral and eye-tracking experiments to study
the production, interpretation, and adaptation of spontaneous speech in
interactive dialogue. She serves as a consulting editor for
Psychological Science and Discourse Processes, and previously served as
associate editor of Discourse Processes and on the editorial board of
Computational Linguistics. She has conducted research in natural
language and human-computer interaction at Atari, Apple, and HP Labs.
She received her doctorate from Stanford in cognitive psychology and
her master's degree from MIT's Architecture Machine Group (aka the
Media Lab), where she worked on computer-generated caricatures and
teleconferencing interfaces.