Discourse and Dialogue

Language use is inherently social; discourse and dialogue unfold in social contexts. This chapter presents an introduction to the cognitive science of discourse and dialogue, from an interdisciplinary perspective that includes experimental psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, artificial intelligence, human-machine interaction, and neuroscience. Two dominant experimental traditions, language-as-product and language-as-action, are discussed, and some classic issues, findings, and theories in discourse processing are presented. Topics surveyed include information packaging, referential communication, achieving joint meanings in dialogue, models of discourse and dialogue structure, audience design and partner-specific processing, and the neural bases of discourse and dialogue. Evidence from experiments and examples from communicative contexts are presented that shed light on how people plan, interpret, and coordinate language within dialogue. The research presented here holds implications for writing for better comprehension, improving robustness in human interaction with spoken dialogue systems, and understanding the neural processing of language during communication.