Focuses on whether women and men have different perceptions about when simultaneous talk becomes interruptive. Asks participants to judge whether 20 overlaps are interruptive when presented with a conflictive interview between a high-power female and a low-power male. Suggests that verbal aggressiveness is a better predictor of recognition of…

Proposes a taxonomy that classifies coherence relations in discourse in terms of four cognitively salient primitives, such as the polarity of the relationship and the pragmatic or semantic character of the link between the units. Finds experimental support for the relevance and psychological salience of the taxonomic primitives. (SR)

Memory for discourse by older adults was examined by comparing their performance with that of younger subjects on a text recognition task. Results showed that the old were better at detecting lexical substitutions than subject-object reversals, suggesting that the old retain lexical items better than the relations between them. (FL)

Uses data from academic counseling encounters at an American university to investigate how the practice of withholding certain information or opinion at an expected moment reconstructs the university institutional order. Details the sequential organization of the practice of withholding. Argues that, through withholding, academic counselors embody…

Finds that zero quotatives (where direct speech is reported with neither a reporting verb nor an attributed speaker) are found when a speaker is clearly constructing attitude; where the omission of a quotative may serve some dramatic effect; and at sights where conversational partners are displaying strongly convergent behavior. (SR)

Focuses on the cooperative processes occurring during collaborative prose recall by adult dyads differing in age and relationship. Indicates that all groups produced similar proportions of story-related and conversation-related products. Notes that group differences in collaboration strategies were observed only at the end of conversations. (HB)

Investigates whether preschool children behave differently when making requests to talking and silent adults and what they know about conversation intrusions. Finds that young children take longer to make their requests of silent adults and older children take longer to address talking adults. (SR)

Examines how interlocutors' beliefs about each other's goals affect conversational references, comparing pairs who were either informed or noninformed about the goal difference, or misinformed that goals were the same. Finds that misinformed and noninformed pairs overlooked clues that may have signaled the goal discrepancy, made conversational…

Compares the communicative effectiveness of spontaneous monologues and dialogues on nonparticipating addressees overhearing talk. Finds that overhearers were more accurate at following instructions in a referential communication task when listening in on dialogues than when listening in on monologues. Suggests greater number of discourse markers…

Describes procedures for constructing story-based causal diagrams. Discusses the cognitive and pragmatic constraints that govern the tendency to attribute events to incomplete causes. Uses causal diagrams to analyze major disagreements about the 1987 stock market crash. Explores how causal diagrams may mitigate the constraints on causal…

Provides a definition of comparison questions and shows how they relate to the semantic categories of two taxonomies for classifying questions, both of which omit comparison questions. Examines the comparison questions that auditors generate when they diagnose problems in a company. (SR)

Identifies and describes the features of spoken discourse that native speakers of English consider to be indicative of level of intellectual functioning. Discourse criteria include detail, coherence, story construction, storytelling performance, and metacomments. (SR)

Finds that both severity of violation and recipient of explanation affect the linguistic content of elementary school-aged girls' excuses. Concludes that older girls used fewer single apologies, incorporated more repair components, and tailored their explanations to the nature of each violation. (JAD)

Studies the Yagua speakers' use of a second position morpheme for indicating that information should be integrated as part of the main event line. Concludes that the information attached to this morpheme is mildly or strongly discontinuous with preceding information or expectations. (HB)

Analyzes the distribution of 33 linguistic markers of complexity across 23 spoken and written registers of English. Identifies a five-dimensional model and uses it to describe the complexity characteristics of spoken and written registers. Finds that, whereas written registers exhibit profiles differing widely in extent and kind of complexity,…