This article examines how very young children in a day care center make use of their peers' gaze shifts to differentially locate and prepare for the possibility of a caregiver intervention during situations of their biting, hitting, pushing, and the like. At issue is how the visible character of a gaze shift--that is, the manner in which it is…

Shifting from a focus on transitions between speakers at turn boundaries, this study examines projective and multimodal structures "inside" a turn-constructional unit (TCU), out of which any turn is built. It analyzes how particular noun-phrasal components within a TCU become projective and shape interactive turn spaces (ITSs) where…

Projection is one of the classic topics in conversation analysis. It is introduced in the "simplest systematics" (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) as a principle that enables the recognition of unit types constituting turn-constructional units (TCUs) and thereby the recognition of possible completion, which is relevant for the organization of…

In this article, a form of intra-turn projection is analyzed where the first component of a compound turn-constructional unit (TCU) containing a phrase, such as "the one (who/that)," projects that a reference (e.g., to a person or to an entity, such as a film) is due to be produced in a later component. This type of utterance is described by…

Like other animals, human beings possess an uncanny ability to coordinate their actions with those of others: Human beings shift posture together, take turns at talk without delay or overlap, and sometimes complete sentences in unison. Researchers who study interaction under the microscope have long been fascinated by phenomena such as behavioral…

Projections of future linguistic events in time are a pervasive task in human interaction. Projection is always based on sequential knowledge (i.e., on how the elements of a superordinated category are serialized in online speech production). This knowledge can relate to the sequencing of actions, as extensively shown in conversation analysis.…

Readers attempt to build coherent representations for what they read, but those representations may fail to capture the actual content of texts. For example, although narrative situations often change dramatically as plots unfold, readers do not necessarily revise what they know to accurately represent the current state of affairs in a text. This…

Past research on anaphor resolution has investigated the availability of discourse information related to characters that part and reunite. Upon reunion, distant concepts that have been associated with the characters before they separated become more accessible than they were just before the reunion. This phenomenon has been referred to as the…

This article proposes an instance-based theoretical framework to account for the influence of both contexts and definitions on learning new word meanings and reports 2 studies that examine hypotheses about learning from context. One is that variation in contexts is important for allowing core meaning features of a word to emerge. The second is…

In 2 spontaneous speech experiments, this study found that multiple perspectives improved overhearers' abilities to select abstract shapes from an array, although single-perspective descriptions were more detailed. Prior findings that overhearers performed better when listening in on dialogues (Fox Tree, 1999) can best be understood as an…

The event specificity of autobiographical memories refers to the degree to which retold memories include specific details about a unique personal experience from a variety of representational systems supported by different brain areas. This article proposes 2 text measures as indicators of event specificity: (a) a measure of temporal sequence in…

Two studies explored the conditions under which readers update their representation of news reports in the presence of alternative plausible explanations for a target event. To do so, this study asked readers to read news reports that mentioned 2 different causes to explain the occurrence of a single event. This study manipulated which of the 2…

This study examines the effect of incentives, a motivational manipulation, on cognitive processes of reading. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through the use of monetary incentives to assess its effect on information processing in reading. One group of college students was paid for what they remembered from several narrative passages they…

An evidential causal relation like, "Because most distinguished students got bad grades, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers," is more difficult to process than a factual one like, "Because he got tired after a long semester, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers" (Noordman & de Blijzer,…

A comparison across spontaneous speech collected in the 1980s and the 2000s reveals a dramatic flip between the use of "said" versus "like" as enquoting devices. The greater use of "like" is reflected in a wide variety of quotation types including reported speech, thoughts, exclamations, and sounds. There is no evidence that "like's" increase in…