EXPRESS: Comparing individual and collective management of referential choices in dialogue

Past research shows that when a discourse referent is mentioned repeatedly, it is usually introduced with a full NP and maintained with a reduced form such as a pronoun. Is this also the case in dialogue, where the same referent may be introduced by one person and maintained by another person? An experiment was conducted in which participants either told entire stories to each other or told stories together, thus enabling us to contrast situations in which characters were introduced and maintained by the same person (control condition) and situations in which the introduction and the maintaining of each character were performed by different people (alternating condition). Story complexity was also manipulated through the introduction of one or two characters in each story. We found that participants were less likely to use reduced forms to maintain referents in the alternating condition. The use of reduced forms also depended on the context in which the referent was maintained (in particular, first or second mention of a character) and on story complexity. These results shed light on how the pressure to signal understanding to one’s conversational partner affects referential choices throughout the interaction.

Closed-loop communication during out-of-hospital resuscitation

Training for effective communication in high-stakes environments actively promotes targeted communicative strategies. One oft-recommended strategy is closed-loop communication (CLC), which emphasises three components to signal understanding: call-out, checkback and closing of the loop. Using CLC is suggested to improve clinical outcomes, but research indicates that medical practitioners do not always apply CLC in team communication. Our paper analyses a context in which speakers’ linguistic choices are guided by explicit recommendations during training, namely out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) resuscitation. We examined 20 real-life OHCA resuscitations to determine whether paramedics adopt CLC in the critical first five minutes after the arrival of the designated team leader (a paramedic specially trained in handling OHCA resuscitation), and what other related communication strategies may be used. The findings revealed that the standard form of CLC was not consistently present in any of the resuscitations despite opportunities to use it. Instead, we found evidence of non-standard forms of CLC and closed-ended communication (containing the first two components of standard CLC). These findings may be representative of what happens when medical practitioners communicate in time-critical, real-life contexts where responses to directives can be immediately observed, and suggest that CLC may not always be necessary for effective communication in these contexts.

It’s a Funny Thing, Humor

This article reflects on the oddness of humor and laughter as human behaviors. It argues against classifying humorous amusement as an emotion by contrasting amusement with standard emotions. It then examines amusement as a kind of pleasure, specifically, the enjoyment of psychological shifts. It argues that humor evolved from mock-aggressive play in pre-human apes, with laughter serving as a play signal. Understanding humor as play not only helps explain laughter but also clarifies issues in the ethics of humor, such as the wrongness of racist and sexist jokes, and the question of whether a sense of humor is a virtue.