{"pk":26268,"title":"Surprising blindness to conversational incoherencein both instant messaging and face-to-face speech","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Language is widely assumed to be a well designed tool for re-liably communicating propositional information between peo-ple. This suggests that its users should be sensitive to failuresof communication, such as utterances that are blatantly inco-herent with respect to an ongoing conversation. We presentexperimental work suggesting that, in fact, people are surpris-ingly tolerant of conversational incoherence. In two previousstudies, participants engaged in instant-messaging conversa-tions that were either repeatedly crossed with other conversa-tions or had lines inserted into them that deliberately contra-dicted available information. In both cases, a substantial pro-portion of participants failed to notice. In a new study, confed-erates inserted unexpected, nonsensical lines into face-to-faceconversations. The majority of participants failed to notice.We argue these findings suggest that we should be wary ofmodeling spontaneous communication in terms of faithful in-formation transmission, or language as a well designed tool forthat purpose.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"communication; miscommunication; languageevolution; change blindness"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0p04f0h3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Gareth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Roberts","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Pennsylvania","department":""},{"first_name":"Benjamin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Langstein","name_suffix":"","institution":"Yeshiva University","department":""},{"first_name":"Bruno","middle_name":"","last_name":"Galantucci","name_suffix":"","institution":"Yeshiva University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26268/galley/15904/download/"}]}