Does the way we interact in conversation changes as we get older? This paper presents a corpus-based study investigating this question by looking into agerelated differences in spontaneous spoken dialogue. Conversations from the Switchboard corpus were analysed using n-gram models, relating the communicative actions as encoded by dialogue acts to speaker age. Results show that older interlocuto...

• Speakers use more redundant references when their interlocutors are learners. Increased found for both child and adult controlling discourse status. According to the communicative efficiency hypothesis, speakers should produce linguistic material comprehension difficulty increases. Here, we investigate a potential source of – listeners’ language proficiency on speakers’ productions, using ref...

In today's global economy, most people all over the world need to speak a second language (L2) for study, work, or social purposes. Assessment of speaking, either in classroom as an external exam, is therefore important task. However, because its fleeting nature, assessment speaking proficiency difficult. For valid assessment, test must measure without construct-irrelevant variance, instance, d...

In this paper, we aim to investigate the coordination of interlocutors behavior in different emotional segments. Conversational coordination between the interlocutors is the tendency of speakers to predict and adjust each other accordingly on an ongoing conversation. In order to find such a coordination, we investigated 1) lexical similarities between the speakers in each emotional segments, 2)...

The  current  study  investigated  the  expression  of  disagreement  by  Iranian  advanced  English learners.  The  data  for  the  study  comprised  the  recorded  discussions  of  26  male  and  female interlocutors  in  three  different  settings:  1)  language  institute,  2)  home  environment,  and  3) university  setting.  Analysis  of  the  arguments  pointed  to  the  influence  of  c...

A key problem for models of joint action is to explain how co-ordination is established and sustained. Existing accounts emphasize the importance of interaction, demonstrating how collaborative feedback leads to more systematized, stable, and partner-specific referring conventions. However, in addition to conventionalizing referring expressions, recent work demonstrates how interlocutors also r...

Interlocutors are typically thought to keep track of information that is shared between speaker and listener (i.e., common ground) and information that is available only to the speaker (i.e., privileged ground). In this study, we investigated whether speakers take their interlocutor’s knowledge into account when choosing between definite articles (e.g., the) and indefinite articles (e.g., a) in...

It has been widely acknowledged that the choice of Japanese demonstratives (the distal a-series, the medial so-series, and the proximal ko-series) in their anaphoric use is regulated by the rules concerned with the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent. In crosslinguistic discussions of anaphoric demonstratives, on the other hand, the effect of the interlocutors’ knowledge of the referent ha...

Towards an assessment method for multi-party audio conferencing systems, we investigated in a pilot study the influence of the number of interlocutors and the audio reproduction method on the quality of experience. Despite some room for improving the sensitivity of our experimental method, the results show that the number of interlocutors and the audio reproduction method influence at least par...