Delphine Dahan
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania

Why are dialogues easier than monologues? The role of hedges

There is ample evidence that people are less prone to misunderstanding in interactive settings, i.e., when engaged in a dialogue with their conversational partner(s), than when speakers address unresponsive audiences. Why? While the role of the addressee, who can ask for clarifications, is undisputed, there’s more limited evidence for the role of the speaker. According to the collaborative model articulated by Clark and colleagues, conversational partners take actions to ensure that they reach mutually acceptable understanding of what the speaker means, seeking and providing adequate evidence of such understanding. In a series of studies in which pairs of participants played a matching game with cards displaying hard-to-name shapes, I have examined hedges (e.g., kinda, sorta) that the individual describing a shape for their partner to select sometimes adds to their descriptions. In this research, I evaluate the claim that a hedge signals the speaker’s uncertainty at being understood and prompts their partner to play an active role in the process by providing a description of what they take to be the referent, thereby mitigating the risk of miscommunication.  With no constraint on the timing and contents of their exchanges, I argue, conversational partners actively collaborate in maximizing the chances of coordinating meaning and understanding.