This study investigated how adults over the lifespan flexibly adapt their use of prosocial speech acts when conveying bad news to communicative partners. Experiment 1a (N = 100 Scottish adults aged 18-72 years) assessed whether participants' use of prosocial speech acts varied according to audience design considerations (i.e., whether or not the…

Background: The impact of hearing impairment is typically studied in terms of its effects on speech perception, yet this fails to account for the interactive nature of communication. Recently, there has been a move towards studying the effects of age-related hearing impairment on interaction, often using referential communication tasks; however,…

We compared speech acts and complexity of maternal speech to firstborn dizygotic twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2nd to the 6th month. Continuous micro-analysis revealed that (a) open-ended questions, direct requests,…

A large body of research has been conducted on the requests employed by monolingual children, whilst knowledge about the requests uttered by bilingual children has remained scarce. To address this issue, this paper, for the first time in the literature, focuses on the request strategies and purposes employed by preschool children bilingual in…

This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers' choices of referring expressions: the topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the rational model that chooses a form based on the informativity of the form and its speech cost. Simulations suggest that both the topicality of the referent…

The significance of producing socially appropriate utterances, not just linguistically correct ones, has given rise to a plethora of studies on speech acts. In this regard, the performance of second and foreign language learners against the norms of the target language and the factors affecting them have yet to be thoroughly investigated. To…

Research suggests that metacommunication in young children's social pretend play is the most complex form of cooperation. In this study, metacommunication was examined using audio and video recordings during pretend play. Participants were 24 children in kindergarten average age 5.1 years. Utterances were coded for metacommunication, the narrative…

During dialogue, people reach mutual comprehension through the production of feedback markers such as "yeah" or "okay." The purpose of the current study was to determine if mental load affects feedback production, as there is currently no consensus as to how mental load constrains the way in which dialogue partners reach mutual…

Conversational interactants rely on each other to cooperate with ongoing actions and activities both structurally (alignment) and affectively (affiliation). They monitor one another's cooperative behaviors to detect any (potential) problems in alignment and affiliation. The present study describes one interactional strategy Japanese speakers use…

Background: Cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) presents a rather complex challenge that requires understanding beyond biological or clinical perspective. Even though inaccuracies in speech articulation are the common consequences of CL/P, individuals with repaired CL/P are likely to experience other language-associated issues. Studies on social…

This study investigated responsive and directive speech from 60 Finnish mothers to their 2-year-old children, as well as correlations with concurrent and later vocabulary. Possible gender differences with regard to both maternal speech and children's vocabulary skills were considered. There were no gender differences in maternal utterance…

The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer-grained characterization of the dynamics of this learning process. We release an open corpus (>15,000 utterances) of extended…

Purpose: Differences between child-directed speech (CDS) by women and men are generally explained by either biological-evolutionary or gender-social theories. It is difficult to tease these two explanations apart for different-sex-parent families because women are usually also the main caregivers. Thus, this study aims to examine the influence of…

Health professionals who come from different cultural backgrounds are required to interact competently and at the most acceptable communication level that meets the demands of the multicultural context in which English is the medium of communication. Lack of proper communication in such contexts can establish a hostile work environment. Thus,…

This study investigates the realisation of apology speech act strategies of Bahasa Indonesia by 60 Indonesian people from across Indonesia as well as their perceptions and evaluations of apologies. For triangulation, the data was collected using three methods: Oral Discourse Completion Task (DCT), Likert scale surveys, and in-depth interviews. The…