A cognitive architecture for the coordination of utterances

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Psycholinguistics
• Linguistics

Background:

• Dialog involves intricate coordination between participants to achieve shared goals.
• Existing research highlights linguistic alignment and turn-taking norms but under-explores moment-to-moment coordination mechanisms in conversation.
• Parallels between language and joint action mechanisms remain underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review coordination mechanisms in joint actions and their relevance to dialog.
• To identify experimental paradigms suitable for studying interactive language.
• To propose a novel methodology for investigating real-time conversational coordination.

Main Methods:

• Review of literature on joint action mechanisms and coordination.
• Analysis of how representations of others' actions inform self-action planning.
• Proposal of a new methodology adapting individual psycholinguistic tasks for dyadic interaction.

Main Results:

• Evidence suggests own and others' actions are represented similarly, influencing action planning.
• Interlocutors likely coordinate by representing and predicting partner utterances during production.
• Proposed methodology involves distributing traditional psycholinguistic tasks across two interacting participants.

Conclusions:

• Understanding dialog coordination requires examining how interlocutors represent and predict each other's utterances.
• The proposed methodology offers a new avenue for studying interactive language production.
• This research bridges the gap between joint action research and the study of conversational coordination.