Knowledge of pragmatic conversational structure

Knowledge of conversational pragmatic structure was examined by asking 53 female volunteers to rate the naturalness of three versions of an appointment-making conversation from a beauty salon. One version was the naturally occurring conversation. The other two were its two most frequent reconstructions created by a separate group of subjects asked to put the scrambled natural conversation "back together again." A chi-square test and standardized deviates showed that the naturally occurring conversation was rated as the most natural one. This result is attributed to subjects' implicit knowledge about conversational pragmatic structure. The role that this knowledge might play in language comprehension is discussed.