32.3401, Calls: Cog Sci, Disc Analysis, Ling Theories, Pragmatics, Psycholing/Romania

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3401. Fri Oct 29 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3401, Calls: Cog Sci, Disc Analysis, Ling Theories, Pragmatics, Psycholing/Romania

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Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2021 06:10:19
From: Mercedes Villalobos Cardozo [mercedes.villalobos at uclouvain.be]
Subject: Discourse Alignment and Prediction

 
Full Title: Discourse Alignment and Prediction 

Date: 24-Aug-2022 - 27-Aug-2022
Location: Bucharest, Romania 
Contact Person: Mercedes Villalobos Cardozo
Meeting Email: mercedes.villalobos at uclouvain.be

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2021 

Meeting Description:

In the course of (spontaneous) interaction, interlocutors tend to converge
onto the same mental representation of the topic in a process called
interactive alignment, a phenomenon that can be explicitly observed when
interlocutors mimic each other’s verbal or nonverbal choices (Pickering &
Garrod, 2004; Rasenberg et al., 2020). Meanwhile, to varying degrees, people
tend to predict upcoming information before encountering it (Clark, 2013).
Although once debated (see Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016, for an overview) it is
now accepted that speakers are able to predict on different levels (Huettig,
2015). Particularly, work on discourse suggests, amongst other things, that
upcoming content (van Bergen & Bosker, 2018; Bosker et al., 2014), discourse
structure (Scholman et al., 2017) and turn end (Bögels, & Torreira, 2015;
Ruiter et al., 2006) are some of the phenomena speakers are able to predict.
There is mounting evidence that both alignment and prediction make
conversation easy, and a link between them in dialogue is expectable
(Pickering & Garrod, 2021).

However, most studies concluded the findings about alignment based on rather
decontextualized language production (see Garrod et al., 2018, for an
overview), thus representing language, intentionally or unintentionally, as a
relatively static unimodal system of categories and abstract descriptive rules
that can be analysed within a clause range. In fact, in spontaneous
communication, interlocutors need to package propositional thought based on
the hierarchy of speech forms, structural units and nonverbal semiotics on the
one hand (Bock & Levelt, 1994; McNeill, 1992), while dealing with the situated
interactional issues on the other (Haselow, 2017). The dynamicity and
multimodality of spontaneous spoken language communication have lead scholars
to conclude that spoken discourse develops in a radically different way from
how scripted language is produced, which in turn triggered a battery of
proposals for how spoken discourse should be adequately described (Chafe,
1994; Du Bois, 2014; Haselow, 2017). Yet, despite these many proposals, we
still know surprisingly little of the way alignment is observable at the
discourse level in dialogue. Given the scarce understanding of discourse
alignment, the predictive discourse comprehension process is still unclear
accordingly. 

To make progress on these questions and voids, we believe it is necessary to
gather contributions from multidisciplinary approaches, such as corpus work,
lab-controlled experiments, statistical analysis and computational modeling
methods, in an attempt to achieve a more clear and complete vision of the
dynamics of these phenomena in natural conversation.


Call for Papers:

The aim of this panel is to bring together researchers interested in getting a
firmer grip on discourse alignment and predictive language processing and the
link between these two phenomena and mechanisms. We especially welcome
contributions that make use of innovative multidisciplinary methods –mainly
observational, experimental and computational– to explore alignment and/or
prediction at the discourse level from one of the following perspectives:

- What is the unit of analysis of discourse alignment and/or prediction?
- How do nonverbal semiotics (e.g. gesture) coordinate with speech in
dialogue? 
- How to measure alignment and/or prediction at discourse level?
- How to statistically or computationally model predictive language processing
at discourse level? 
- What is the nature of (discourse) alignment, a neutral interactive practice
or ultimate goal of communication? 
- What factors (linguistic and extralinguistic) affect prediction in
conversation?
- What experimental setting is ideal to measure prediction in interaction?
- What effects do familiarity between interlocutors, inferences of the
speaker’s cognitive state and engagement in conversation, amongst others, have
in prediction?
- How do speakers and hearers make use of certain devices in interaction (e.g.
discourse markers) to formulate predictions?

We invite you to submit your preliminary abstract (of a maximum of 250 words)
to mercedes.villalobos at uclouvain.be and junfei.hu at uclouvain.be before November
15, 2020. Once the acceptance of the workshop proposal is official, you will
be contacted to submit your full abstract in Easychair before January 15,
2022.




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