Jackson Tolins

• PhD Student at University of California, Santa Cruz

Many investigators of collaborative performance employ paradigms where success is maximized by conversational convergence, such as referential card tasks and map tasks. With these paradigms, researchers demonstrated that convergence benefits performance. Performance in other collaborative domains, however, may be better served by linguistic diverge...

Children successfully learn words through overhearing others engaged in verbal interactions. The current studies investigated the degree to which four-year-old overhearers are influenced by the response behaviors of addressees and by the interactional pattern of the speakers and addressees. It was found that while addressee responses on their own d...

People overhearing referential communication understand more when they listen in on dialogues rather than monologues. Some have proposed this is because entrainment selects better referential expressions. In a corpus analysis, we considered the role of addressees in contributing to entrainment and measured the degree to which particular perspective...

Text messaging has become an increasingly common medium for communication. Its format provides a novel context for the study of social activity in ways that both mirror face-to-face dialogue and extend beyond it. Based on the analysis of a corpus of text-mediated conversations incorporating animated images (“graphical interchange formats,” commonly...

Observing others in conversation is a common format for comprehending language, yet little work has been done to understand dialog comprehension. We tested whether overhearers use addressee backchannels as predictive cues for how to integrate information across speaker turns during comprehension of spontaneously produced collaborative narration. In...

Personality can be assessed with standardized inventory questions with scaled responses such as "How extraverted is this character?" or with open-ended questions assessing first impressions, such as "What personality does this character convey?" Little is known about how the two methods compare to each other, and even less is known about their use...

Brief addressee responses such as uh huh, oh, and wow, which are called backchannels, are typically considered reactive phenomena – devices that respond in various ways to what was just said. Addressees, in providing backchannels, actively shape story telling in spontaneous dialogue ( Bavelas et al., 2000). We contrasted generic backchannels with c...

Labeled categories are learned faster, and are subsequently more robust than categories learned without labels. The label feedback hypothesis (Lupyan, 2012) accounts for these effects by introducing a word-driven top-down modulation of perceptual processes involved in categorization. By testing categorization flexibility with and without labels, we...

Judgments of personality typically employ ratings of Big Five scale items such as “How emotionally stable is this person?” with choices from 1 (least) to 5 (most). Such questions focus raters’ attention on an experimenter’s dimensions of interest. We show that the personality traits provided as a result of open-ended questions such as “What persona...

Musicians commonly make use of vocalizations in order to represent, rather than describe, a melody or musical phrase. The present study considers the role these “semantically empty” vocalizations play in the situated activity of music instruction. Data from video recordings of a clarinetist and his instructor demonstrate that these vocal representa...

Musicians, in the discussion and teaching of their art, commonly make use of vocalizations in order to demonstrate a particular melody or musical phrase. In the present study, we consider the use of these vocalizations as part of embodied depictions, and the role that these embodied communication practices play in music instruction. Data drawn from...