Jean E. Fox Tree

• University of California, Santa Cruz

Small talk plays a big role in conversational perception. In the study here, pairs of conversational participants engaged in three iterations of an ecologically valid task-break dialogue where the break was either small talk via videoconferencing or waiting the same amount of time with cameras and mics turned off. Small talk increased conversationa...

We examined how politeness perception can change when used by a human or voice assistant in different contexts. We conducted two norming studies and two experiments. In the norming studies, we assessed the levels of positive politeness (cooperation) and negative politeness (respecting autonomy) conveyed by a range of politeness strategies across ta...

Backchannel choices affect conversational development. Some backchannels invite interlocutors to continue to the next part of what they are saying and others invite them to elaborate on what they have just said. We tested how communicative modality (audiovisual, audio, text), environmental setting (wholly in-lab, partially in the wild), and convers...

Discourse markers help people navigate conversations. We tested how the use of five discourse markers – so, but, oh, I think, and like – was influenced by communication medium (text, phone, videoconferencing) and conversation type (task-related conversation or small talk). Additionally, we tested whether these discourse markers influenced the amoun...

In a controlled lab experiment, we compared how in-person and robot-mediated communicative settings affected attitudes towards communicators and discourse phenomena related to conversational negotiation. We used a mock interview within-participants experiment design where each participant (mock interviewee) experienced both types of communication w...

How do people determine whether a conversation is good or bad? Do conversational phenomena (reaching common ground, striving to contribute equally, successful conversational closings) influence judgments of conversation quality and recall of conversations? We tested whether individuals reading previously transcribed conversations considered psychol...

Identifying the characteristics of hyperpartisan communication that make it so amenable to sharing is crucial to combating the spread of misinformation. We analyzed a corpus of hyperpartisan and non-hyperpartisan writing produced on internet forums and found that markers of spontaneous communication are strongly predictive of hyperpartisan speech,...

Sarcasm has been defined in a plethora of different ways, but too often the definitions hinge on researchers’ own perceptions of what constitutes sarcasm or verbal irony, and not enough on the perceptions of people producing the sarcastic content. We asked people (N = 82) to transform internet forum posts to make them sarcastic without providing in...

We apply three communication theories (the collaborative theory of language use, communication accommodation theory, and media richness theory) to aspects of conversational structure (openings, closings) and communicative setting (audiovisual, written) in order to make predictions about how people will feel about conversational interactions. We dis...

We tested how the introduction and removal of well-defined roles influenced contribution behaviors in instant messaging conversations. Pairs of participants worked on a referential communication task where one participant (the director) had more information than the other (the matcher). Next, these roles were removed and the participants were allow...

We compared psychological distance in a mock job interview that was conducted either in-person or via mobile telepresence. In the mobile telepresence setting, the interviewers communicated through a telepresence robot. In one of the first explorations of how mobile telepresence affected psychological distance, we analyzed use of pronouns that sugge...

This work provides initial evidence of reciprocity in conversation. We tested whether conversations with contribution imbalances brought on by task demands contained attempts to redress the created imbalance. Pairs of participants identified public art via phone communication. One member of the pair, the director, gave instructions using a map whil...

We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed...

We examined the predictive value of wait signals for sarcasm in online debate forums. In a corpus comparison we examined the word frequency of um and uh across six corpora. In general, there were far more fillers in spoken corpora than written corpora. We also found that the proportion of ums to uhs varied by corpus type. In Experiment 1 we tested...

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...

We explore the expression of personality and adaptivity through the gestures of virtual agents in a storytelling task. We conduct two experiments using four different dialogic stories. We manipulate agent personality on the extraversion scale, whether the agents adapt to one another in their gestural performance and agent gender. Our results show t...

More and more of the information available on the web is dialogic, and a significant portion of it takes place in online forum conversations about current social and political topics. We aim to develop tools to summarize what these conversations are about. What are the CENTRAL PROPOSITIONS associated with different stances on an issue, what are the...

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...

Storytelling serves many different social functions, e.g. stories are used to persuade, share troubles, establish shared values, learn social behaviors, and entertain. Moreover, stories are often told conversationally through dialog, and previous work suggests that information provided dialogically is more engaging than when provided in monolog. In...

Designing virtual characters that are capable of conveying a sense of personality is important for generating realistic experiences, and thus a key goal in computer animation research. Though the influence of gesture and body motion on personality perception has been studied, little is known about which attributes of hand pose and motion convey par...

Story-telling is a fundamental and prevalent aspect of human social behavior. In the wild, stories are told conversationally in social settings, often as a dialogue and with accompanying gestures and other nonverbal behavior. This paper presents a new corpus, the STORY DIALOGUE WITH GESTURES (SDG) corpus, consisting of 50 personal narratives regene...

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...

We explore the expression of personality and adaptivity through the gestures of virtual agents in a storytelling task. We conduct two experiments using four different dialogic stories. We manipulate agent personality on the extraversion scale, whether the agents adapt to one another in their gestural performance and agent gender. Our results show t...

More and more of the information available on the web is dialogic, and a significant portion of it takes place in online forum conversations about current social and political topics. We aim to develop tools to summarize what these conversations are about. What are the CENTRAL PROPOSITIONS associated with different stances on an issue; what are the...

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...

Words like well, oh, and you know have long been observed and studied in spontaneous speech. With the proliferation of on-line dialogues, such as instant messaging between friends or back-and-forth postings at websites, there are increasing opportunities to observe them in spontaneous writing. In Experiment 1, the interpretation of discourse marker...

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...

How does written and spoken feedback influence communicators’ effectiveness in a shared task? Groups of two to four participants engaged in a referential communication task. The director described an array of shapes to the rest of the group via streaming video chat. In each group, one to three matchers attempted to arrange cards depicting those sha...

Literature on auditory distraction has generally focused on the effects of particular kinds of sounds on attention to target stimuli. In support of extensive previous findings that have demonstrated the special role of language as an auditory distractor, we found that a concurrent speech stream impaired recall of a short lecture, especially for ver...

According to the rhythm rule in metrical phonology, a word's stress alternates from the second syllable to the first when followed by a word with first syllable stress, a situation also known as a stress clash. For example, the second-syllable stressed word sixTEEN will be produced as SIXteen in the phrase SIXteen CANdles. Using pseudo-words in dif...

Language mode theory proposes that language activation can span from a monolingual mode (predominant activation of one language) to bilingual mode (both languages activated). While some argue that linguistic performance is influenced by the language mode the bilingual speaker is in, others have found that language mode activation has no affect on p...

A growing body of work has highlighted the challenges of identifying the stance that a speaker holds towards a particular topic, a task that involves identifying a holistic subjective disposition. We examine stance classification on a corpus of 4731 posts from the debate website ConvinceMe.net, for 14 topics ranging from the playful to the ideologi...

Accurate, error-free communication is essential for success in many areas, such as eyewitness testimony, human factors design, business, education, and personal relationships. Traditional communication uses similar modalities: Participants communicate by talking or by writing, but not both at the same time with the same addressees. New communicativ...

Quotations in spontaneous conversation are introduced by quotatives such as say, be like, go and be all. In recent years, the use of say in the colloquial English of some speakers has plummeted, but not vanished. We tested what listeners thought different quotation devices meant, whether they reliably interpreted devices to mean those things, and h...

We examined the effects of hedges and the discourse marker like on how people recalled specific details about precise quantities in spontaneous speech. We found that listeners treated hedged information differently from like-marked information, although both are thought to be indicators of uncertainty or vagueness. In addition, hedges had different...

Deliberative, argumentative discourse is an important component of opinion formation, belief revision, and knowledge discovery; it is a cornerstone of modern civil society. Argumentation is productively studied in branches ranging from theoretical artificial intelligence to political rhetoric, but empirical analysis has suffered from a lack of free...

In two experiments, we investigated predictions of the collaborative theory of language use (Clark, 1996) as applied to instant messaging (IM). This theory describes how the presence and absence of different grounding constraints causes people to interact differently across different communicative media (Clark & Brennan, 1991). In Study 1, we docum...

A key goal in agent research is to be able to generate multimodal characters that can reflect a particular personality. The Big Five model of personality provides a framework for codifying personality variation. This paper reviews findings in the psychology literature to understand how the Big Five trait of emotional stability correlates with chang...

A growing body of work has highlighted the challenges of identifying the stance a speaker holds towards a particular topic, a task that involves identifying a holistic subjective disposition. We examine stance classification on a corpus of 4873 posts across 14 topics on ConvinceMe.net, ranging from the playful to the ideological. We show that ideol...

The recent proliferation of political and social forums has given rise to a wealth of freely accessible naturalistic arguments. People can "talk" to anyone they want, at any time, in any location, about any topic. Here we use a Mechanical Turk annotated corpus of forum discussions as a gold standard for the recognition of disagreement in online ide...

Listeners' comprehension of phrase final rising pitch on declarative utterances, or uptalk, was examined to test the hypothesis that prolongations might differentiate conflicting functions of rising pitch. In Experiment 1 we found that listeners rated prolongations as indicating more speaker uncertainty, but that rising pitch was unrelated to ratin...

Viewing discourse markers as one of a class of signals that communicators use to manage conversation can help make sense of the varied and contradictory functions ascribed to them. Issues for further testing include demonstrating that speakers and listeners ascribe particular functions to particular markers, tracking the development of these functi...

The lack of consistency in how bilingual language dominance is assessed currently impedes cross-experiment comparisons (Grosjean, 1998). We present a paper-and-pencil dominance scale that can be used to quantify the language dominancy of bilingual participants. The scale targets three main criteria important in gauging dominance (Grosjean, 1998; Fl...

Listeners' comprehension of phrase final rising pitch on declarative utterances, or uptalk, was examined to test the hypothesis that prolongations might differentiate conflicting functions of rising pitch. In Experiment 1 we found that listeners rated prolongations as indicating more speaker uncertainty, but that rising pitch was unrelated to ratin...

In 2 spontaneous speech experiments, this study found that multiple perspectives improved overhearers' abilities to select abstract shapes from an array, although single-perspective descriptions were more detailed. Prior findings that overhearers performed better when listening in on dialogues (Fox Tree, 199914. Fox Tree , J. E. 1999 . Listening in...

A comparison across spontaneous speech collected in the 1980s and the 2000s reveals a dramatic flip between the use of said versus like as enquoting devices. The greater use of like is reflected in a wide variety of quotation types including reported speech, thoughts, exclamations, and sounds. There is no evidence that like's increase in use corres...

We explored factors influencing the retelling of urban legends. As predicted by prior work, people retold truthful and scary stories. But people also retold well-known stories. This contrasts with the expectation that people would not pass on a story that everyone already knew. Also as predicted by prior work, repeating a story increased its credib...

The current study measures laypeople's uses of um, uh, you know, and like, including folk notions of meanings, self-assessments of use, history of discussing use, and attitudes toward the words. Unlike the prevalent idea in the popular press that these discourse markers are interchangeable speaker production flaws, respondents in this study demonst...

The discourse marker use of the word like (‘we hitch a ride out of there with uh this like one crazy like music major guy’) is considered by many to be superfluously sprinkled into talk, a bad habit best avoided. But a comparison of the use of like in successive tellings of stories demonstrates that like can be anticipated in advance and planned in...

Speech disfluencies are phenomena that cause a break in the smooth flow of talk, affecting speaking and understanding. Everyone who talks produces disfluencies. Several decades of research have provided a good understanding of the types of disfluencies people produce, and a beginning understanding of why disfluencies occur and how they impact addre...

Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an ironic tone of voice. Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in written form, re...

In spontaneous speaking, the is normally pronounced as thuh, with the reduced vowel schwa (rhyming with the first syllable of about). But it is sometimes pronounced as thiy, with a nonreduced vowel (rhyming with see). In a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation, speakers were found to use thiy to signal an immediate suspension of speech t...

In a series of three experiments we investigated syntactic priming using a sentence recall task. Participants read and memorized a target sentence for later recall. After reading a prime sentence and engaging in a distraction task, they were asked to produce the target sentence aloud. Earlier investigations have shown that this task is sensitive to...

In 3 experiments, this article compares how overhearers interpreted second speakers’ contributions to a conversation depending on whether the second speaker responded to a first speaker immediately; paused and responded; said um and responded; or said um, paused, and then responded. The conversational snippets tested were unscripted and diverse; an...

The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the f...

Although you know and I mean are frequent in spontaneous talk, researchers have not agreed on what purpose they serve. They have been thought by some to be used similarly and by others to be used differently. Similarities of uses at a surface level encouraged historical discussions of these two markers in the same breath. The current synthesis deta...

We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on rele-vance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a vi-sual channel. We f...

Despite their frequency in conversational talk, little is known about how ums and uhs affect listeners' on-line processing of spontaneous speech. Two studies of ums and uhs in English and Dutch reveal that hearing an uh has a beneficial effect on listeners' ability to recognize words in upcoming speech, but that hearing an um has neither a benefici...

We investigated how naively produced prosody affects listeners' end interpretations of ambiguous utterances. Non-professional speakers who were unaware of any ambiguity produced ambiguous sentences couched in short, unambiguous passages. In a forced-choice task, listeners could not tell which context the isolated ambiguous sentences came from (Exp....

We investigated how people produce simple and complex phrases in speaking using a newly developed immediate recall task. People read and tried to memorize a target sentence, then read a prime sentence, then did a distractor task involving the prime sentence. Despite the delay and activity between memory and recall, people could still recall the tar...

Discourse markers are usually studied from the vantage point of corpora analyses. By looking at where they fall in spontaneous talk, hypotheses can be made about their possible functions. However, direct tests of listeners' uses of these expressions are rare. In five experiments, we looked at the on-line spontaneous speech comprehension effects of...

A study compared the communicative effectiveness of spontaneous monologues and dialogues on nonparticipating addressees overhearing talk. Overhearers were more accurate at following instructions in a referential communication task when listening in on dialogues than when listening in on monologues. Several extraneous variables could not account for...

In spontaneous speaking, the is normally pronounced as thuh, with the reduced vowel schwa (rhyming with the first syllable of about). But it is sometimes pronounced as thiy, with a nonreduced vowel (rhyming with see). In a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation, speakers were found to use thiy to signal an immediate suspension of speech t...

Speech disfluencies have different effects on comprehension depending on the type and placement of disfluency. Words following false starts (such as windmill after in the in the eleventh example is um in the a windmill) have longer word monitoring latencies than the same tokens with the false starts excised. The decremental effect seems to be limit...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1993. Submitted to the Department of Psychology. Copyright by the author.