Language in dialogue: when confederates might be hazardous to your data
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THEORETICAL REVIEW
Language in dialogue: when confederates might be hazardous to your data Anna K. Kuhlen & Susan E. Brennan
Published online: 27 November 2012 # Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2012
Abstract Experiments that aim to model language processing in spoken dialogue contexts often use confederates as speakers or addressees. However, the decision of whether to use a confederate, and of precisely how to deploy one, is shaped by researchers’ explicit theories and implicit assumptions about the nature of dialogue. When can a confederate fulfill the role of conversational partner without changing the nature of the dialogue itself? We survey the benefits and risks of using confederates in studies of language in dialogue contexts, identifying four concerns that appear to guide how confederates are deployed. We then discuss several studies that have addressed these concerns differently—and, in some cases, have found different results. We conclude with recommendations for how to weigh the benefits and risks of using experimental confederates in dialogue studies: Confederates are best used when an experimental hypothesis concerns responses to unusual behaviors or low-frequency linguistic forms and when the experimental task calls for the confederate partner to take the initiative as speaker. Confederates can be especially risky in the addressee role, especially if their nonverbal behavior is uncontrolled and if they know more than is warranted by the experimental task. Keywords Psycholinguistics . Speech perception . Speech production . Social cognition . Confederates . Dialogue
A. K. Kuhlen (*) Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt University of Berlin, 10099 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] S. E. Brennan Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Conversational partners in laboratory experiments are not always what they seem. For example, subjects may think that they are interacting via intercom with another naive subject in the next room when, in fact, they are responding to prerecorded utterances. Or they may think that they are interacting with a computer when, in fact, an experimenter (or a “Wizard of Oz”) is responding to them. Psycholinguistic studies concerned with generalizing to language processing in context are increasingly situated in dialogue, where they are likely to include a conversational partner for the subjects. It is not uncommon for such partners not to be naive, like the subjects, but instead to be accomplices whose purpose it is to assist the experimenter in staging the dialogue context. The use of confederates is of course a longstanding tradition in social psychology. Often the unusual behavior of one or more people is intended to serve as the main stimulus in the experiment, so staging the situation with confederates may be the only practical way to collect data. Alternatively, using a confederate may simply be a convenience for the experimenter. However, when it comes to serving as conversati
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