Determines the characteristics of interactions that influence judgments of interruption behavior in naive observers. Asks subjects to decide whether an example of an interruption was an interruption and then rate it in terms of how "good" or "bad" it was. Finds that naive observers use some of the same features described in…

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)

Examines the relationship between a sentence and its context by exploring the role of partial repetition in the interpretation of a text and its component sentences. Shows patterns in the lexico-semantic interactions in a text, and shows that these patterns affect the interpretation of the text's individual messages. (SR)

Examines the impact 4 pragmatic skills (requesting, turn taking, responding promptly when spoken to, and maintaining the logic of the conversation) have on likeability, as seen by 10-year-old girls. Finds that display of pragmatic competence resulted in higher likeability and more positive descriptions. (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…

Shows that institutional conversations differ from natural conversations in their closings. Contrasts felicitous closings by both native and highly proficient nonnative speakers with felicitous closings by nonnatives. Shows that native speaker interviews are not reopened, but only followed by separate, limited postsession conversations. (SR)

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)