Some Grammatical Characteristics of Spoken Dialog in a CSCW Context

Abstract

In Chapter 6 of this book (‘A Language of Cooperation?’ by Clarke, Connolly, Garner and Palmen), some of the linguistic characteristics of cooperative dialog are described, based on the analysis of linguistic data obtained as part of the ROCOCO Project, which was aimed at ‘establishing the communicational requirements of IT systems that support humans cooperating remotely’ (the name ‘ROCOCO’ being derived from the phrase ‘RemOte Cooperation and Communication’). The particular variety of CSCW studied was the cooperative activity of industrial product designers, situated in separate geographical locations and therefore reliant upon electronic media to support their communicative interaction. The study involved observing and recording various pairs of (student) product designers under different experimental conditions (e.g. with and without a video link enabling them to see each other’s faces) and then conducting a detailed analysis of their communicative activities in the context of their cooperative task.