Procedural coordination in the matching task

Abstract

Participants in conversation who recurrently discuss the same targets require fewer and fewer words to identify them. This has been attributed to the collaborative elaboration of conceptual pacts, that is, semantic coordination. But participants do not only coordinate on the semantics of referring expressions; they also coordinate on how to do the task, that is, on procedural coordination. In a matching task experiment (n = 22 dyads), we examined the development of four aspects of procedural coordination: Card placement (CP), implicit generic coordination (IGC), explicit generic coordination (EGC) and general procedural coordination (GPC) in two conditions (the classic condition where targets remain the same over trials, and a new cards condition, where they change at each trial, thus increasing the difficulty of semantic coordination). Procedural coordination constituted almost 30% of the total amount of talk in the matching task. Procedural coordination was more effortful when semantic coordination was more difficult and the four aspects of procedural coordination developed differently depending on participant roles.