Biomedical subjects

M F Schober

Publications and source records attributed to M F Schober.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2001

Disfluency rates in conversation: effects of age, relationship, topic, role, and gender.

After reviewing situational and demographic factors that have been argued to affect speakers' disfluency rates, we examined disfluency rates in a corpus of task-oriented conversations (Schober & Carstensen, 2001 ) with variables that might affect fluency rates. These factors included: speakers' ages (young, middle-aged, and older), task roles (director vs. matcher in a referential communication task), difficulty of topic domain (abstract geometric figures vs. photographs of children), relationships between speakers (married vs. strangers), and gender (each pair consisted of a man and a woman). Older speakers produced only slightly higher disfluency rates than young and middle-aged speakers. Overall, disfluency rates were higher both when speakers acted as directors and when they discussed abstract figures, confirming that disfluencies are associated with an increase in planning difficulty. However, fillers (such as uh) were distributed somewhat differently than repeats or restarts, supporting the idea that fillers may be a resource for or a consequence of interpersonal coordination.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Clarifying question meaning in a household telephone survey.

This study contrasts two interviewing techniques that reflect different tacit assumptions about communication. In one, strictly standardized interviewing, interviewers leave the interpretation of questions up to respondents. In the other, conversational interviewing, interviewers say whatever it takes to make sure that questions are interpreted uniformly and as intended. Respondents from a national sample were interviewed twice. Each time they were asked the same factual questions from ongoing government surveys, five about housing and five about recent purchases. The first interview was strictly standardized; the second was standardized for half the respondents and conversational for the others. Respondents in a second conversational interview answered differently than in the first interview more often, and for reasons that conformed more closely to official definitions, than respondents in a second standardized interview. This suggests that conversational interviewing improved comprehension, although it also lengthened interviews. We conclude that respondents in a national sample may misinterpret certain questions frequently enough to compromise data quality and that such misunderstandings cannot easily be eliminated by pretesting and rewording questions alone. More standardized comprehension may require less standardized interviewer behavior.

Journal Article↗

PubMed1993

Spatial perspective-taking in conversation.

Speakers can describe the locations of objects from their own perspective ("on my left" or "on the left"), their addressee's ("on your right" or "on the right"), or some perspective that avoids choosing one or the other person ("closer to both of us"). This study shows that speakers set spatial perspectives differently with actual conversational partners than with the usually studied imaginary addressees. Speakers with partners tended to use more egocentric perspectives than solo speakers. Pairs varied idiosyncratically in the perspective-setting strategies they picked, but all engaged in the same collaborative process: talking until both were sure they had understood each other. When conversational roles switched, the new speakers allocated spatial perspectives with remarkable precision, taking their partners' perspectives just as often as the partner had taken theirs. Speakers were more explicit about whose perspective they were taking when they held the floor for only one description than when they gave many descriptions in a row.

Communication↗