EFFICIENCY OF THE ADDRESSEES CONTRIBUTION TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF REFERENCES - COMPARING MONOLOGUES WITH DIALOGS

According to Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs' collaborative model of reference, the repetition of a referential communication task produces changes in how references are established (decreasing the number of words and speaking turns, and increasing the number of definite references and labels), and these changes should be seen as the development of a process of collaboration aimed at mutual understanding at the lowest possible cost. According to this model, the utterances of a speaker who has been asked to make references without feedback from an addressee, and is therefore unable to collaborate with an audience to establish a referential common ground, should not evolve in the same way as they would in a referential dialogue. More precisely, no significant decrease in the number of words uttered should be observed, and there should be no increase in the use of definite references and referential labels after the first trial. To test the predictions of the collaborative model of reference, while also assessing the actual importance of collaboration in the referential process, a modified version of the experiment carried out by Krauss and Weinheimer (1967) was used: groups of subjects with (''Dialogue'' condition) and without (''Monologue'' condition) listeners were compared for the same repeated referential-communication task. The prediction of the collaborative model of reference was confirmed by the overall results. However, the great differences between the subjects in the ''Monologue'' condition led us to qualify the conclusions drawn: despite the lack of collaboration, half of the subjects in the ''Monologue'' condition used verbal strategies comparable with those used by the speakers in the ''Dialogue'' condition.