Behavioral and Brain Sciences



Short Communication

One alignment mechanism or many?


Arthur B. Markman a1, Kyungil Kim a1, Levi B. Larkey a1, Lisa Narvaez a1 and C. Hunt Stilwell a1
a1 Department of Psychology, University of Texas, 1 University Station, A8000, Austin, TX 78712 markman@psy.utexas.edu kyungil@mail.utexas.edu larkey@mail.utexas.edu grimmlr@mail.utexas.edu stilwell@psy.utexas.edu http://www.psy.utexas.edu/psy/FACULTY/Markman/index.html

Abstract

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) suggest that communicators synchronize their processing at a number of linguistic levels. Whereas their explanation suggests that representations are being compared across individuals, there must be some representation of all conversation participants in each participant's head. At the level of the situation model, it is important to maintain separate representations for each participant. At other levels, it seems less crucial to have a separate representation for each participant. This analysis suggests that different mechanisms may synchronize representations at different linguistic levels.