The Use and Recognition of Sequential Structure in Dialogue

Two experiments are reported. In the first, four spontaneous dialogues were tape-recorded and a 20-line passage from each one transcribed. The 20 lines were then typed on separate file cards, and the set of 20 cards shuffled and given to 10 student subjects, with instructions to reconstitute the original order of each passage. This they were able to do with far greater than chance accuracy, suggesting that the original speakers were producing their conversation in accordance with certain sequencing procedures also known to other members of the speech community. In the second experiment the same task of sequence reconstitution was performed on four artificial dialogues whose individual utterances were produced in standard syntactic forms, so as to remove cues to the overall sequence carried by syntactic variations. In this way a second hypothesis was tested and confirmed: that the constraint upon the ongoing form of a verbal interaction operates over the domain of semantics as well as syntax.