At my previous job, we had a corporate librarian. Part of her job description was to fill interlibrary loan requests for books and journal articles we didn’t have access to online or in the corporate library, which happened pretty frequently. I did a lot of legwork on my own, tracking things down in local libraries, but there were just some journals I couldn’t get my hands on.
Now that I am a grad student with access to a university library, I rarely run into a situation where I need a paper from a journal that our library doesn’t carry. However, a few weeks ago I was trying to track down a paper in Cahier de psychologie cognitive (Current Psychology of Cognition), and I couldn’t find it ANYWHERE. On a whim I decided to check out the library website to see whether the university has an interlibrary loan service, and lo and behold, it DOES. I know, I’m a nerdy grad student, but I find this very exciting. I made the request for the paper online, and was able to download a scanned copy a couple of weeks later. It isn’t the best paper in the world, and I’ve honestly never heard of the journal before. But it reports some results that I find very interesting and relevant for what I am working on.
The paper is titled “Efficiency of the addressee’s contribution to the establishment of references: Comparing monologues with dialogues”, by Yves Chantraine and Michel Hupet. In a nutshell, they compared the performance (in a referential communication task) of pairs of speakers and listeners with speakers with no audience, and listeners who listened only to recordings. They wanted to see if duration, word count, and number of definite references differed between the speaker-in-dialogue condition, and speaker-in-monologue condition. In dialogues, speakers and listeners collaborate to agree upon shorthand referring expressions so they don’t have to describe things from scratch every time in a referential communication task. The question was, would speakers in monologue exhibit the same pattern? If they did not, this would be evidence for the importance of listener feedback in referential communication. If they did exhibit the same pattern, it might throw a bit of a wrench into the idea that feedback plays an important role in establishing these referring expressions.
The interesting twist that made this paper worth chasing after through interlibrary loan, was that half of the speakers in the “monologue” condition (no listeners) matched the pattern of the speakers-in-dialogue, and half did not. To say it another way, half of the monologue speakers converged on shortened referring expressions, even without feedback from a listener, following a similar pattern to the speakers-in-dialogue. This makes the results difficult to interpret, and also probably explains why it wasn’t published in a better journal. However, these results replicate an earlier study that looked at just the monologue condition without the dialogue for comparison. It isn’t really clear why this occurred, but nevertheless it seems to imply that at least some people are able to imagine themselves communicating with someone when in an “asynchronous” situation — which leaves the door open for designing interventions that might make the non-present others more salient at the time people are naming and tagging items in user-contributed content systems. It also makes me wonder, whom did the participants in this study imagine they were talking to?
