Understanding Miscommunication: Speech Act Recognition in Digital Contexts.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Social Psychology
• Communication Studies

Background:

• Successful communication relies on accurate intention recognition.
• Interpersonal context can challenge intention recognition.
• Face-threat is a key factor in communication dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how face-threat in speech acts affects recognition accuracy.
• To examine sender and receiver confidence in communicative success.
• To explore message characteristics associated with face-threat.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments involving senders creating and receivers interpreting text messages.
• Utilized a set of 32 speech acts scaled for face-threat.
• Analyzed message length and perceived clout in relation to face-threat.

Main Results:

• Higher face-threat speech acts were less accurately recognized.
• Messages for more threatening speech acts were longer and perceived with lower clout.
• Sender confidence exceeded receiver confidence, but neither correlated with actual success.

Conclusions:

• Face-threat significantly impedes accurate speech act recognition.
• Message characteristics like length and clout are influenced by threat level.
• Confidence in communicative success does not equate to actual success, highlighting a gap in interpersonal communication perception.