Abstract: Prosodic features in spontaneous speech help disambiguate implied meaning not explicit in linguistic surface structure, but little research has examined how these signals manifest themselves in real conversations. Spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between familiar speakers in conversational dyads were acoustically analyzed for prosodic contrasts. A prosodic contrast was defined as a statistically reliable shift between adjacent phrasal units in at least 1 of 5 acoustic dimensions (mean fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency variability, mean amplitude, amplitude variability, and mean syllable duration). Overall, speakers contrasted prosodic features in ironic utterances with utterances immediately preceding them at a higher rate than between adjacent nonironic utterance pairs from the same interactions. Across multiple speakers, ironic utterances were spoken significantly slower than preceding speech, but no other acoustic dimensions changed consistently. This is the first aco...

Abstract: Recent work on the occurrence of “uh” and “uhm” in ordinary talk-in-interaction is concerned almost exclusively with its relation to trouble in the speech production process. After touching briefly on this environment of occurrence, this conversation-analytic article focuses attention on several interactional environments in which “uh(m)” figures in other ways—most extensively on its use to indicate the “reason-for-the-interaction's-launching.” The underlying theme is that accounts for what gets done and gets understood in talk-in-interaction must take into account not only its composition, but also its position—not only with respect to the grammar of sentences, but also with respect to the organization of turns at talk, of action sequences encompassing multiple turns at talk, and of occasions of talk, all of which are demonstrably oriented to by speakers in their production of the talk and by recipients in their analyzing of the talk.

Abstract: Two experiments examined whether inconsistent effects of analogies in promoting new content learning from text are related to prior knowledge of the analogy per se. In Experiment 1, college students who demonstrated little understanding of weather systems and different levels of prior knowledge (more vs. less) of an analogous everyday situation read a text about weather systems that included the analogy or a control version that did not. Results indicated that those with more prior knowledge of the analogy performed better on weather system learning measures (sentence verification and number of concepts in essays). Prior knowledge of the analogous domain interacted with presence of the analogy in the text on 1 learning measure: Those with more prior knowledge who read the analogy text had fewer misconceptions in their conceptual models of weather than those who read the control text. Think-aloud protocols collected in Experiment 2 suggested that analogies in the text constrained prior knowledge activation...

Abstract: This article demonstrates the potential of sound iconicity for automatic text analysis. This study claims that—at least in poetic language—the ratio of plosive versus nasal sounds in a text predicts its emotional tone as it is perceived by readers; that is, poems that have a relatively high frequency of plosive sounds are more likely to express a pleasant mood with high activation, whereas a relatively high frequency of nasal sounds indicates an unpleasant mood with low activation. Moreover, these findings are universal (i.e., they are independent of specific languages or language families). This article presents the results of an intercultural study testing the previous hypothesis.

Abstract: To what extent are speakers' utterances shaped by their expectations of addressees' behavior, and to what extent are they shaped by the feedback they receive from addressees? In 39 pairs (32 men and 46 women), speakers told addressees 2 jokes. Addressees were either attentive or else distracted by a second task, and speakers expected addressees to be either attentive or distracted. Attentive addressees gave more feedback than distracted addressees. Speakers with attentive addressees told the jokes with more vivid details than those with distracted addressees, but only when they expected attentive addressees. Speakers with distracted addressees put less time into the task than did those with attentive addressees, but only when they did not expect them to be distracted. These results suggest that speakers' narrations are shaped not only by addressees' feedback, but also by how speakers construe a lack of feedback on the part of a distracted addressee.

Abstract: The aims of this article are to address how learning is constituted and can be studied as a phenomenon in interaction and to discuss how teaching and learning are related. Theoretically, the articl ...

Abstract: This study examined how the contribution of self-explanation to science text comprehension is affected by the cohesion of a text at a local level. Psychology undergraduates read and self-explained a science text with either low or high local cohesion. Local cohesion was manipulated by the presence or absence of connectives and referential words or phrases that explicitly link successive sentences. After the self-explanation activity, participants answered open-ended comprehension questions about the text. Participants in the high local cohesion condition produced higher quality explanations, including more local bridging self-explanations, than those in the low local cohesion condition. However, these explanations, although higher in quality, did not improve comprehension. Performance on text-based comprehension questions was better in the low local cohesion condition. In addition, the correlation between self-explanation quality and comprehension performance was generally higher in the low local cohesion...

Abstract: There is growing consensus that, for trained readers, poetic-text processing involves a genre decision, which triggers genre-based conventional expectations and directs attention to the textual devices. This research examines how students recognize and process texts in poetic versus prose form at different points during their literary education. The study compared 48 students, 16 in each of Grades 4, 8, and 12 as they thought aloud when reading poems in the graphic shape of poetry, as well as prose. Results showed that the 4th graders did not yet categorize a poem as a poem. The 8th graders made significantly more poetic-genre categorizations than the 4th graders, but only the 12th graders spent more time processing the texts in poetic form than prose, thinking aloud about their genre-based expectations and the textual devices. Developing the structure of knowledge needed for poetic literacy seems to require a long process of formal literary education.

Abstract: Two experiments investigated the processing and appreciation of double grounding, a form of intentional ambiguity often used in the construction of headlines. For example, in “Russia takes the froth off Carlsberg results,” the key element, “takes the froth off,” is significant both metaphorically, where it refers to the detrimental impact of Russia, and metonymically via a contextual link between the company Carlsberg and beer, its best-known product. This study predicted that double-grounded metaphors would be more cognitively demanding than comparable single-grounded metaphors (where there is no such contextual link) and that, consequently, they would result in greater cognitive effects. Experiment 1 found longer reading times for headlines that employed double-grounded metaphors than for headlines that employed single-grounded metaphors with a similar meaning. Results suggested the re-profiling of the literal interpretation in double-grounded metaphors is cognitively demanding. Experiment 2 found that ...

Abstract: A number of studies have now examined the development of children's appreciation for verbal irony, typically by testing children's comprehension of the ironic speaker's belief and intent. This article examines a topic that has received much less attention: children's ability to produce irony in context-appropriate ways. The study presents 7- to 11-year-olds with brief stories that were each followed by an experimenter's literal or ironic remark. Of critical interest was whether children would show sensitivity to the convention of mode adoption by replying to irony with irony of their own. Results showed that children's overall rate of mode adoption was 8.67%. When ironic criticisms were presented (Experiment 1), irony was employed more frequently in the responses of older children than in the responses of younger children. When ironic compliments were presented (Experiment 2), no age effects were observed in children's ironic responses. Comprehension data show that the complimentary form of irony was more...

Abstract: Comprehension is an important factor in the functioning of irony. Readers who are unaware of the irony in an utterance are “sheep,” whereas readers who understand the irony are “wolves” (Gibbs & Izett, 2005). Factors that may impact on the attitude toward irony not only include comprehension, but agreement (agreeing with the position taken in the utterance or not) and group membership (belonging to the target of the irony or not) as well. In an experiment, participants were asked to evaluate either ironic prejudices against women or ironic prejudices against men. The attitude toward the utterance and text is more positive when participants recognize the ironic intention, agree with the statement, and are not the members of the targeted group. These results imply that studies into the pragmatic effects of verbal irony should consider these 3 factors.

Abstract: Recently, irony researchers have emphasized that irony interpretation involves metarepresentational inferencing in order that the perceiver can determine whether the speaker's attitude is counterfactual to their statement. This research investigated whether the perception of irony also depends on the extent to which an ironic statement is suitably face-threatening in its particular context. Target statements were direct and indirect ironic remarks, and context conditions were modulated on 2 dimensions: context incongruity (strong vs. weak) and speaker–target relationship (close vs. distant). This study examined interpretations of ironic criticisms (Experiments 1 and 2) and ironic compliments (Experiment 3). Results showed evidence that suitable face-threat was important to a perception of irony: In some contexts (strongly incongruent context and close speaker–target relationships), irony was perceived more strongly for direct ironic remarks; and in other contexts (weakly incongruent context and distant sp...

Abstract: To further our understanding of the nature of the form–function mapping in anaphoric paradigms, this study investigated the referential properties of strong pronouns (long pronouns) in Estonian. Cross-linguistically, 2 main accounts of the long–short distinction have been proposed: the salience account (long pronouns refer to less salient antecedents) and the contrast account (long pronouns refer to entities that are being mentioned contrastively). To test these claims, this study compared parallel corpora of Estonian and Finnish to see how Estonian long pronouns are realized in Finnish and what the grammatical role of the antecedent is. Building on Pajusalu (1997), this study also analyzed the referential properties of long pronouns from the perspective of alternative semantics (Rooth, 1992) and Jackendoff's (1972) and Buring's (2003) research on contrast. The corpus patterns support the contrast account, indicating that the long–short distinction cannot be straightforwardly reduced to referent salience....

Abstract: Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of various constraints on the processing of jokes. Participants read humorous jokes and nonhumorous alternatives of the jokes, which were presented in 3 conditions that manipulated discourse context (comedy, political, and control). In Experiment 1, participants rated the funniness of texts and provided some recall data. In Experiment 2, participant's eye movements were collected to examine the effects of the different contexts on the online processing of the texts. Results confirmed that context constraints reliably impact how jokes are appreciated and processed, but the patterns of results were sometimes counterintuitive—namely, constraints of the discourse context appear to influence the processing of verbal jokes early on, whereas constraints associated with the text type strongly affect later processing and the results of processing, including recall. A constraint-based model is offered as a theoretical account for these findings.

Abstract: Interruptions are common in joint activities like conversations. Typically, interrupted participants suspend the activity, address the interruption, and then reinstate the activity. In conversation, people jointly commit to interact and to talk about a topic, establishing these commitments sequentially. When a commitment is suspended, face is threatened and grounding disrupted. This article proposes and tests a model for suspending and reinstating joint activities, using evidence from naturally occurring suspensions in the Switchboard corpus (Study 1) and from a laboratory experiment (Study 2). Results showed that long suspensions led to more politeness and more collaborative effort in reinstatement than short suspensions. Also, listeners were more polite than speakers in suspending joint activities. Overall, suspending and reinstating a joint activity was shown to be a collaborative task that requires coordination of both the topic and the participants' face needs.

Abstract: This study investigated the effect of visual signals on perceptual span in text search and the kinds of signal information that facilitate the search. Participants were asked to find answers to specific questions in chapter-length texts in either a normal or a window condition, where the text disappeared beyond a vertical 3° gaze-contingent region. The texts either contained no signals, paragraph marks, or headings that did or did not inform about the text content—that is, topic headings or fake headings. The information conveyed by paragraph marks and topic headings both proved to be very helpful to the search process. Moreover, the results revealed a larger perceptual span for the signaled texts than for the unsignaled ones. The results are taken as evidence for the existence of a text layout span in text search, which is larger than the span for letter and word processing, and includes the useful typographical information on the printed page.

Abstract: Following a positively quantified statement such as, “A few of the children sang the chorus,” a plural pronoun is likely to refer to the set of children who sang (the reference set). Negative natural language quantifiers (NLQs) such as few or not many, on the other hand, are more likely to be followed by reference to the complement set of children who did not sing. According to the presupposition–denial account of negative NLQs, the complement set is available for pronominal reference following these expressions because they imply a shortfall between the amount denoted and a presupposed larger amount. Focus on the shortfall set is effectively focus on the complement set. Previous support for this account is largely based on a series of experiments which show that complement set focus is also possible following positive NLQs if a previously mentioned character expects a larger amount, thereby creating a shortfall between the character's expectations and the amount denoted by the NLQ. It is not clear, howev...

Abstract: During reading, the model of the situation described by the text is continuously accommodated to new text input. The hypothesis was tested that readers are particularly sensitive to diagnostic text information that can be used to constrain their existing situation model. In 3 experiments, adult participants read narratives about social situations that were ambiguous in terms of whether they involved 2 or 3 social cliques. Diagnostic text information enabling the reader to constrain the situation model to 1 of the 2 potential versions required longer reading times than non-diagnostic information, and fundamentally affected the structure of the situation model. Recognizing the diagnostic value of critical text information did not require additional working memory resources, but updating the situation model according to the diagnostic information did. This evidence may suggest that some of the situation model updating is occurring offline. The results are discussed with regard to working memory resources required in updating situation models.

Abstract: In a pedagogical method increasing in popularity, students of all levels—from elementary to post graduate—are likely to be asked to engage in debate with peers. How they understand the purposes and values of argumentive discourse is likely to affect its effectiveness. The 3 studies presented here involve junior high school, senior high school, and university students in the United States and China, and are based on their responses to scenarios involving either the opportunity for or necessity of argumentive discourse in cases where a difference of viewpoints exists. The results reveal that many, and in some cases most, students do not appreciate the value of such discourse as having the potential to enhance individual or collective understanding. Comparisons of participants from different populations, however, indicate cultural, as well as developmental, differences, although evidence appeared of individual malleability in relation to cultural patterns.

Abstract: There is general agreement that discourse markers help dialogue partners to highlight or locate available goal- or coherence-related information. There is, however, less agreement with regard to how the nature of the relation between the marked stretch of discourse and the rest of the dialogue should be defined. Recent work (Louwerse & Mitchell, 2003) has used a substitution test to characterize the relation a discourse marker expresses. It is unclear, however, what the effects are of substitution on the suggested role of discourse markers. In this article, 7 experiments are reported. Four experiments examine the suggested role of discourse markers across a variety of topics, domains, languages, and media formats. The results indicate that discourse markers are helpful to localize the stretches of discourse that are believed to contain pragmatic information pertaining to discourse coherence and dialogue goals. Three experiments investigated the effect of the substitution of discourse markers on their sugg...

Abstract: Readers apply their own standards of coherence while reading text. Readers with a low standard of coherence are thought to find a sparse and incomplete representation more coherent than readers who employ a higher standard. This article reports 3 experiments that examined standards of coherence imposed by skilled and less-skilled readers by having them make a judgment of coherence (JOC) to sentence pairs that varied on semantic and causal relatedness. The JOC task required the participants to decide whether sentence pairs were coherent. The results indicated that both variables influenced JOC for both types of readers, but that semantic relatedness had a greater impact on less-skilled readers, whereas causal relatedness had a greater influence on the skilled readers. The results are discussed in the context of the construction–integration model of comprehension.

Abstract: This article explores the role of self-regulation in strategies that readers use to decide the order in which to read the different sections of a hypertext. This study explored 3 main strategies for link selection based on (a) link screen position, (b) link interest, and (c) the semantic relation of a link with the section just read. This study followed Winne's (1995, 2001) model of self-regulated learning to try to explain why some readers select hyperlinks based on strategies that lead to lower levels of comprehension (i.e., screen position and personal interest). Results from 2 studies revealed that readers with low prior knowledge base their decisions on what to read next on a default screen position or on link interest more often if they are instructed to set a low learning goal, if they regularly use shallow learning strategies (e.g., memorizing), or if they are poor at calibrating their comprehension. Readers' link selection strategies mediated the effect of the self-regulation variables studied on...

Abstract: Two studies attempt to determine the causes of poor metacomprehension accuracy and then, in turn, to identify interventions that circumvent these difficulties to support effective comprehension monitoring performance. The first study explored the cues that both at-risk and typical college readers use as a basis for their metacomprehension judgments in the context of a delayed-summarization paradigm. Improvement was seen in all readers, but at-risk readers did not reach the same level of metacomprehension accuracy as a sample of typical college readers. Further, whereas few readers reported using comprehension-related cues, more at-risk readers reported using surface-related cues as the basis for their judgments. To support the use of more predictive cues among the at-risk readers, a second study employed a concept-map intervention, which was intended to make situation-model level representations more salient. Concept mapping improved both the comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy of at-risk readers...