What Do You Know About the Dynamics of Conversation?
By Zahaira Cruz Aponte and Frances Blanchette
If you’ve already read the research piece and featured partner interviews in this newsletter, then you know that communication involves a lot of adapting to the conversational situation. This piece allows you to test out your knowledge of adaptation. Try it and you may find that you already know more than you think about this fascinating aspect of human language!
Instructions
The following are excerpts from a conversation in which someone is talking about what they did over the weekend. In each excerpt, the person is talking to someone different. Read through the excerpts and try to guess who the person is talking to in each one (the possibilities are listed below). Pay attention to which cues are most helpful as you make your guesses.
Excerpt #1:
So remember how I told you we were planning to go camping? Well, turns out it was raining so we ended up ordering in and watching a movie instead. Needless to say the kids were not disappointed—they were glad to have a chill weekend at home.
Excerpt #2:
We had considered going camping, but since it was raining we decided to stay home. We did a number of things around the house, including ordering food and watching a movie, which was nice for the kids especially.
Excerpt #3:
What did you do this weekend? We snuggled up and watched a movie—it was so fun! I hope you had a fun weekend too!
Possibilities:
a. speaking to a supervisor
b. speaking to a young child
c. speaking to a coworker
How did you make your guesses?
In making your guesses, you may have used a number of different cues. For example, in excerpt 2 the word “considered” suggests that the speaker would like to sound a bit more formal. On the other hand, in excerpt #1, the speaker says “turns out” instead of “it turns out”, which suggests they are speaking in a more casual setting. In excerpt #3 the speaker is clearly trying to be a bit more interactive, which suggests they are talking to someone who might need higher levels of interaction to stay engaged in the conversation.
These examples barely scratch the surface of how we adapt our speech during conversation, but hopefully this exercise helped you to see that you already know a lot about this! We hope you agree that our ability to adapt our speech in this way is pretty amazing and interesting—one of the many things that makes language so fascinating to study.
Answer key
- c
- a
- b