Entrainment on the Move and in the Lab: The Walking Around Corpus

We examined lexical choice and variability in referring expressions during direction-giving to pedestrians. The Walking Around Corpus comprises an experimentally parameterized collection of spontaneous spoken dialogues produced by 36 pairs of people communicating by mobile telephone; it provides both a testbed for lexical entrainment “in the wild” as well as a resource for pedestrian navigation applications. A stationary partner (the Giver) directed a mobile partner (the Follower) to walk about 1.8 miles, to 18 destinations on a medium-sized campus. Givers viewed a map marked with target destinations, labels, and photos. Followers carried a cell phone with GPS and a digital camera in order to photograph the destinations they visited; Givers monitored Followers’ progress as a cursor on a map display. Immediately after the navigation task, Followers returned to the lab and both were tested individually on their spatial ability and memory for the destinations. Next, the Experimenter attempted to interfere with any conceptual precedents they had established by giving Followers printed copies of the photos they had just taken and prompting them (sometimes with competing labels) to identify each destination. Finally, each pair participated in 6 rounds of a more traditional referential communication lab task to repeatedly match duplicate copies of the Follower’s pictures of the destinations. Results include significant rates of lexical entrainment, evidence for partner-specific conceptual pacts, and that joint navigation efficiency is affected by directiongivers’ spatial ability. The Walking Around Corpus is available to the research community.