When people interact to establish shared symbols for novel objects or concepts, they often rely on multiple communicative modalities as well as on alignment (i.e., cross-participant repetition of communicative behavior). Yet these interactional resources have rarely been studied together, so little is known about if and how people combine multiple…

Two experiments were conducted to examine the production and detection of common, everyday deception. Experiment 1 was a naturalistic study in which participants provided their most recent truthful and deceptive (both sent and received) text messages. Participants in Experiment 2 were asked to generate text messages that were either deceptive or…

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters' emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely…

When two people interact, reference presentation is shaped with the intention of supporting addressee understanding, allowing for ease of acceptance, thus minimizing overall collaborative effort. To date, analysis of such "audience design" has focused largely on adult-adult or adult-child interaction but seldom on adult-teenager…

When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors…

This study examined the forms and functions of reformulation markers (RMs) in the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and biology to see whether there is any disciplinary variation regarding these linguistic devices and their functions in essays written by undergraduate students. To this purpose, two corpora of university students' essays…

The rhetoric used by right-wing anti-immigration politicians is considered important to their political success. Such rhetoric commonly contains figurative frames with metaphor and/or hyperbole. In two experiments (n[subscript experiment1] = 411, n[subscript experiment2] = 407), we tested when and how such figurative frames add to the intense and…

Metaphor theory bears many implications for counseling processes, but metaphor in extended counseling talk is seldom evaluated. This article reports an exploratory skin conductance and discourse analysis of metaphorical versus literal communication styles in facilitating affective engagement over time. After background interaction with the…

We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

Sarcasm production and comprehension have been traditionally described in terms of pragmatic factors. Lexical cues have received less attention, but they may be important potential indicators. A major obstacle to examining such features is determining sarcastic intent. One solution is to analyze statements explicitly marked as being sarcastic.…

This study investigated changes in both the liar's and the conversational partner's linguistic style across truthful and deceptive dyadic communication in a synchronous text-based setting. An analysis of 242 transcripts revealed that liars produced more words, more sense-based words (e.g., seeing, touching), and used fewer self-oriented but more…