---

Presenter: Gregory C. Macdonald

Faculty Sponsor: Erik Cheries

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Psychology and Behavioral Sciences

Session: Poster Session 6, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM, Concourse, B4

ABSTRACT

Conversations are the foundation of human connection. There are many different factors that influence the quality of our conversations, including body language, tone of voice, and the specific words we deploy. But communication is a dynamic process and recently researchers have found that “exploration” in conversation– e.g., gathering new information and staying close to the topic of the sharer–  leads to more alignment between the conversation participants (Speer et al., 2024). The current project hypothesizes that there is a specific feature that supports effective exploration in any good conversation; effective conversationalists regularly insert sounds and gestures, confirming to the speaker that they are listening, which linguists call “discourse markers”. These discourse markers can be words like “so”, “yeah”, and “okay” or gestures like head-nods. Certain frequencies and temporal patterns of these markers may have underlying significance in the sense that they help cognitively organize the conversational structure in real time. But, research has not identified discourse markers as important to the process of exploration. To test this hypothesis, I facilitated natural conversations in a lab setting to observe whether specific frequency and temporal patterns of discourse markers correlate with strong exploration performance. Specifically, I examined what frequency of discourse marker usage has the strongest association with effective exploration of our partners’ interests, measured by our partners’ openness and engagement. My results will be discussed in terms of how proper frequent use of discourse markers during exploration may encourage people to speak more openly and engagingly about their interests, fostering conversational connection.