Referential Communication Between Friends and Strangers in the Wild

Abstract

The Map Task (Anderson et al., 1991) and Tangram Task (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986) are traditional referential communication tasks that are used in psycholinguistics research to demonstrate how conversational partners mutually agree on descriptions (or referring expressions) for landmarks or unusual target objects. These highly controlled, laboratory-based tasks take place under conditions that are relatively unusual for naturally-occurring conversations (Speed, Wnuk, & Majid, 2016). Using the Artwalk Task (Liu, Fox Tree, & Walker, 2016) – a real-world-situated blend of the Map Task and Tangram Task – we showed that the process of negotiating referring expressions “in the wild” is similar to the process that takes place in a laboratory. In addition to replicating laboratory results showing lexical entrainment, we also found that acquaintanceship and extraversion influenced the number of unique descriptors used by pairs. In round 1, introverts in stranger pairs used fewer descriptors but introverts in friend pairs were indistinguishable from extraverts. The influence of extraversion declined by round 2. Lexical entrainment observed in labs is generalizable to realworld settings, and lexical entrainment in naturalistic communication, at least, is subject to social and personality factors.