Psycholinguistic experiments have shed much light on the distinct processes of listening and speaking. However, less is known about how these processes are coordinated in the service of language use in conversation, both between individuals who alternate in their roles as speaker and hearer, and within the mind of the individual language user who is processing on many levels at once. This article addresses the coordination of language use between individuals. I will present a program of research that focuses on how paralinguistic cues and processes contribute to communication, including: how conversation is shaped by communication media through the process of grounding; how devices such as hedges, latencies to responses, and intonation may be used in coordination; how disfluencies are distributed in referential communication and how they affect the interpretation of utterances; and how the choice of particular expressions in conversation reflects partner-specific adjustments between speakers and addressees. These paralinguistic aspects of language use bear on how people manage to repair problems in speaking and understanding in order to converge on the same perspective.

View full abstract

This paper reviews seven years of work on small group discussion at the Human Communication Research Centre, Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, UK. Our thesis is that difficulties for decision-making in work groups can be characterized in terms of properties that disrupt the dialogue processes by which people establish common ground. Using an inter-disciplinary research cycle consisting of field observation, the collection of corpora of small group discussions from workplace settings, questionnaires about communication practices, and laboratory simulations, we explore this thesis for three factors we have observed to affect group communication—group size, status differences, and organizational structures which cut across the group membership—and describe what we think should be research priorities for the coming years.

View full abstract

Transmission of paralinguistic information (speaker's attitude or intention, PI here-after) was examined by means of phonetic experiments. The two basic issues examined were a) how does PI influence the speech signal? and b) how do listeners perceive PI? Utterances of six selected PI types—‘Admiration’, ‘Suspicion’, ‘Disappointment’, ‘Indifference’, ‘Focused (or raised vocal effort)’ and ‘Neutral’— were elicited from 3 speakers of standard Japanese and analyzed acoustically. Results of acoustic analyses revealed significant influence of PI on all acoustic parameters, i.e., fundamental frequency, duration, amplitude, and frequency spectrum. Moreover, multiple regression analyses showed highly significant correlation between the acoustic measures and the three-dimensional perceptual space of PI, which was constructed by means of an MDS analysis of confusion data. All experimental results obtained in this study suggest unanimously that PI can be accurately transmitted by speakers to listeners. Another important finding was the local nature of PI: PI's influence was observed often as the phonetic perturbation of phonological features like phrase-initial pitch rise, phrase-final pitch movement, and lexical accent. The local nature of PI is clearly different from the more global phonetic effects due to non-linguistic information, such as speaker's emotion.

View full abstract

An affective priming paradigm was used to test the hypothesis that when presented with an emotionally spoken emotional word, speakers of a high-context language (e.g., Japanese) process its vocal tone more thoroughly than its verbal content. Native Japanese speakers were presented with such an utterance (prime), immediately followed by a neutrally spoken emotionally valenced word (target). They were to judge the emotional meaning of the target as quickly as possible. In support of the foregoing hypothesis, Study 1 showed that this judgment is made more quickly if the prime is spoken in a congruous emotional vocal tone than if it is spoken in an incongruous tone. However, no comparable effect was found as a function of the emotional verbal meaning of the prime. This was the case despite the fact that emotional vocal tones of primes were considerably less extreme than their verbal meanings. Furthermore, Study 2 predicted and found that when a prime is spoken in a neutral tone of voice, the verbal meaning of the prime has a reliable priming effect. Implications for culture, communication, and cognition are discussed.

View full abstract

It has been suggested that chat system provides real time communication like direct conversation. However, chat conversation has distinctive complexity compared with direct and telephone conversation. One often has difficulty in determining whether he is the talker or the watcher. Furthermore, it is not always clear for one that which topic appearing on the record should be referred to. In the present paper, the authors investigated how the order in chat conversation is established, and what kind of efforts are made by the participants. Generally speaking, the couples of subjects maintained the order by sending messages alternately, suggesting that they could basically determine whether they were the talker or the watcher. However, the order was easily broken down when one sent a message so as to interrupt the other's sending. It is discussed that one of the reasons that such interrupting messages were sent was duality of the meaning of an interval between two successive messages; the interval might simultaneously be a sign of the other participant's silence and that of the other's taking time to prepare his/her message. Breaking down of the order were often followed by the situation that several threads appeared on the display were maintained for a while, implying that order with more complicated interaction could emerge through the failure at taking the roles of talker and watcher alternately.

View full abstract

This study explored the effects of metacognitive processing on a creative idea generation task using the method of conceptual priming (Marsh, Bink, & Hicks, 1999). In our experiment, 81 undergraduate students were required to generate original creatures. In the task, the subjects' metacognition was manipulated through instructional variation. Factor analysis of the questionnaire data on the subjects' attitudes toward the task identified their elemental metacognitive strategies. The subjects' creative performances were examined in relation to metacognitive factors and the effects of priming. The results suggested that activating the metacognitive level of processing could cause an improvement in creativity. Implicit processes in creative thought and a search-range of the idea space were also discussed.

View full abstract

In this paper, we propose the prediction system which uses the matchable situation decomposition technology in order to achieve a concept acquisition model which predicts various events in the real world. Our proposed prediction system extracts very regular partial situations which correspond to the concepts, constructs neural networks based on each concept, and predicts outputs based on the concepts selected by the integration unit. By simulations of using the card classification problem, we show that our proposed prediction system can predict from fewer events than other prediction systems.

View full abstract

Pulsed neural network models can account for the cognitive processes in which internal states change rapidly and abruptly. This study constructed a pulsed neural network model for selective visual attention based on the temporal tagging hypothesis. According to the temporal tagging hypothesis, the effect of visual attention reflects the modulation of spatiotemporal correlation of neural activities, not the modulation of firing rates. The proposed model produced the temporal synchrony of spikes purely within the simple spike response model framework. The model could simulate the data from Moran & Desimone (1985), and showed that simple pulsed neural networks without excessive neurophysiological details were at the appropriate level for the models of visual cognition. Compared with traditional connectionist models, pulsed neural network models appear to be the better framework to deal with real-time temporal dynamics of cognitive process including feature binding.

View full abstract

The present study attempts to describe effects of diagrammatic externalizations in problem solving. To achieve the purpose, we examined how the externalization transformed problem solving processes. On the basis of findings obtained in the protocol experiment that we reported previously, we constructed four versions of production system models. The initial model, Base mode, was designed to be consistent with problem solving processes of subjects who were prohibited from drawing diagrams. We compared the behavior of the Base model with the behavior of the other three models, Conservation model, Browsing model, and Conservation-Browsing model, mounted with additional functions corresponding to the roles of externalizations. The results of the computer simulations were relatively consistent with the findings in the psychological experiment. Especially, the Conservation-Browsing model confirmed the results fitted to the data obtained in the experiment.

View full abstract

The major function of prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known as working memory, which retains relevant information on-line. Rao et al. (1997) found neurons contributing to both object and spatial working memory. However, its mechanism is still unknown. In this study, we propose a neural network model of working memory in order to shed light on the mechanism. Our model has two input streams and can cope with the task in which two kinds of information have to be retained at the same time. We simulated some physiological results with this model. As a result, we could simulate temporal activity patterns of the neuron responding to both object and location information as shown in Rao et al. (1997). And we considered domain-specificity by constructing three architectures of neural networks and the physiological results could be simulated best by no-domain specificity model. This result suggests that there should be no domain-specificity in PF working memory.

View full abstract

In the paper, we investigated the effects of movement on unfamiliar face recognition. Stimuli were shaded faces generated from 3-D data points recorded by the 3-D movement recorder. In Experiment 1, the stimulus was a static image or a facial motion sequence. The results revealed that facial motion displays were less advantageous than static displays. Experiment 2 and 3 examined the effects of facial motion and rigid rotation on face recognition when a light source position changed. It was found that the facial motion information was still disadvantageous, while the recognition performance for rigid rotation displays was as high as that for static displays. These results suggest that these two movements have different effects on face recognition.

View full abstract

This study investigated the determinants of the canonical view to recognize the three-dimensional structure of an object with self-occluded parts using a quantitative analysis of line drawings of novel polyhedral objects in terms of the geometrical properties. The results showed that 65% of drawings properly illustrated the whole structure and configuration of polyhedra. Although different accidental and generic views could be obtained for each polyhedra, the drawings showed a strikingly similar view. In more than 80% of proper drawings subjects chose a generic view by which the constituent surfaces could be observed maximally. The results suggested that the canonical view of a polyhedron (1) included the maximum number of observable surfaces, (2) exposed the features of configuration, and (3) was one of the generic views, which had a stable topological structure in spite of the variance of viewpoint in the wider range.

View full abstract