Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Do speakers avoid ambiguities during dialogue?

Sarah L Haywood1, Martin J Pickering, Holly P Branigan

  • 1Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. sarah.haywood@ed.ac.uk

Psychological Science
|May 5, 2005
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Bilingual representation of multi-word phrases: Evidence from phrase-acceptability judgment in Chinese-English bilinguals.

Cognition·2026
Same author

The role of explicit contextual truth in counterfactual reasoning: ERP evidence from Chinese.

Brain and language·2026
Same author

Language choice and naming difficulty: Evidence from bilingual degraded picture naming.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2026
Same author

The Mechanistic Framework of Alignment: A Unified Model.

Cognitive science·2025
Same author

The role of semantics and phonology in bilingual picture naming: Evidence from the phono-translation effect.

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition·2025
Same author

Revisiting bilingual processing: insights from L1 transfer in L2 acquisition.

Brain and language·2025

Speakers balance their own ease of production with the listener's ease of comprehension when producing ambiguous dialogue. This study reveals sensitivity to both factors in turn-taking conversational contexts.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Human Communication

Background:

  • Speakers may prioritize their own ease of production or their addressees' ease of comprehension when generating utterances.
  • Prior research suggested ease of production influences syntactic choices, but ease of comprehension does not.
  • Previous studies lacked conversational contexts with dynamic role-swapping.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate factors influencing speakers' production of ambiguous utterances in a dialogue setting.
  • To examine the interplay between ease of production and ease of comprehension in turn-based communication.
  • To determine if speakers adjust utterance ambiguity based on contextual ambiguity and role.

Main Methods:

  • Participants engaged in a dialogue task involving giving and following instructions to manipulate objects on a grid.

Related Experiment Videos

  • The experimental design incorporated alternating roles (instructor/follower) within the dialogue.
  • Utterances were analyzed for syntactic form repetition and disambiguation strategies in relation to visual context.

    • Main Results:

    • Speakers demonstrated a tendency to replicate the syntactic form used by their interlocutor, indicating sensitivity to ease of production.
    • Speakers were more likely to produce unambiguous utterances when the visual context was potentially ambiguous.
    • This disambiguation behavior suggests a heightened sensitivity to the addressee's ease of comprehension.

    Conclusions:

    • Speakers actively consider their addressees' ease of comprehension, alongside their own ease of production.
    • Dialogue dynamics, including role-swapping, reveal nuanced production strategies.
    • The findings challenge previous assumptions by showing that ease of comprehension significantly impacts utterance production in interactive settings.