Jean E Fox Tree
Biographic Data
| ID | 659261 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jean E Fox Tree |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jean E Fox |
| FAMILY NAME | Tree |
| SIGNATURE | TREE J E F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5407-5935 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 205 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Collateral signals and conversation quality
When we think of the quality of a conversation, what comes to mind? Generally, it is the content that was discussed during the conversation, with uplifting topics leading to positive experiences, and dispiriting topics leading to negative experiences. However, there is also a great deal of information that is exchanged in the process of conveying conversational content, such as how communicators get their words out, how they produce those words, …
Small talk in videoconferencing improves conversational experience and fosters relationships
Small talk plays a big role in conversational perception. In the study here, pairs of conversational participants engaged in three iterations of an ecologically valid task-break dialogue where the break was either small talk via videoconferencing or waiting the same amount of time with cameras and mics turned off. Small talk increased conversational participants' enjoyment of conversations, their willingness to engage in future conversations with…
Framing, more than speech, affects how machine agents are perceived
We tested how speech phenomena (discourse markers like oh and you know and fillers like uh and um) and the conceptualisation of voices (as human or machine) affected speaker quality ratings (trustworthiness, friendliness, intelligence, and nervousness) across dialogues and monologues. Listeners preferred human voices over synthesised voices in dialogue containing discourse markers and fillers (Study 1). Shifting the location of discourse markers …
Conversational Fluency and Attitudes Towards Robot Pilots in Telepresence Robot-Mediated Interactions
In a controlled lab experiment, we compared how in-person and robot-mediated communicative settings affected attitudes towards communicators and discourse phenomena related to conversational negotiation. We used a mock interview within-participants experiment design where each participant (mock interviewee) experienced both types of communication with the same experimenter (mock interviewer). Despite communicating with the same person, participan…
Discourse markers in small talk and tasks
Discourse markers help people navigate conversations. We tested how the use of five discourse markers - so, but, oh, I think, and like - was influenced by communication medium (text, phone, videoconferencing) and conversation type (task-related conversation or small talk). Additionally, we tested whether these discourse markers influenced the amount of words contributed throughout the conversation and how interlocutors felt about their conversati…
In Pursuit of a Good Conversation: How Contribution Balance, Common Ground, and Conversational Closings Influence Conversation Assessment and Conversational Memory
How do people determine whether a conversation is good or bad? Do conversational phenomena (reaching common ground, striving to contribute equally, successful conversational closings) influence judgments of conversation quality and recall of conversations? We tested whether individuals reading previously transcribed conversations considered psycholinguistic characteristics in their assessments of whether the conversations were good or bad. Additi…
Why so Few, Still? Challenges to Attracting, Advancing, and Keeping Women Faculty of Color in Academia
From its earliest beginnings, the university was not designed for women, and certainly not for women of color. Women of color in the United States are disproportionately under-represented in academia and are conspicuous by their absence across disciplines at senior ranks, particularly at research-intensive universities. This absence has an epistemic impact and affects future generations of scholars who do not see themselves represented in the aca…
Look, Dude: How hyperpartisan and non-hyperpartisan speech differ in online commentary
Identifying the characteristics of hyperpartisan communication that make it so amenable to sharing is crucial to combating the spread of misinformation. We analyzed a corpus of hyperpartisan and non-hyperpartisan writing produced on internet forums and found that markers of spontaneous communication are strongly predictive of hyperpartisan speech, regardless of whether that speech is left- or right-leaning. The markers of spontaneous communicatio…
Oh, SO Sarcastic: Diverse Strategies for Being Sarcastic
Sarcasm has been defined in a plethora of different ways, but too often the definitions hinge on researchers’ own perceptions of what constitutes sarcasm or verbal irony, and not enough on the perceptions of people producing the sarcastic content. We asked people ( N = 82) to transform internet forum posts to make them sarcastic without providing information about what sarcasm is. Participants then critically examined their creations. People iden…
Reciprocity in Instant Messaging Conversations
We tested how the introduction and removal of well-defined roles influenced contribution behaviors in instant messaging conversations. Pairs of participants worked on a referential communication task where one participant (the director) had more information than the other (the matcher). Next, these roles were removed and the participants were allowed to communicate freely. Participants then switched director/matcher roles and the procedure was re…
Lexical divergence in collaborative creativity
Psychological distance in mobile telepresence
Reciprocity in Conversation
This work provides initial evidence of reciprocity in conversation. We tested whether conversations with contribution imbalances brought on by task demands contained attempts to redress the created imbalance. Pairs of participants identified public art via phone communication. One member of the pair, the director, gave instructions using a map while the other, the follower, walked around a small town finding public art pieces. Later, trained rate…
The Sarchasm: Sarcasm Production and Identification in Spontaneous Conversation
We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed a task designed to elicit sarcasm, although no instruction to produce sarcastic content was provided…
Overhearing Dialogues and Monologues: How Does Entrainment Lead to More Comprehensible Referring Expressions
People overhearing referential communication understand more when they listen in on dialogues rather than monologues. Some have proposed this is because entrainment selects better referential expressions. In a corpus analysis, we considered the role of addressees in contributing to entrainment and measured the degree to which particular perspectives were used across different speakers in dialogues and monologues. In a test of overhearer comprehen…
The role of addressee backchannels and conversational grounding in vicarious word learning in four-year-olds
Children successfully learn words through overhearing others engaged in verbal interactions. The current studies investigated the degree to which four-year-old overhearers are influenced by the response behaviors of addressees and by the interactional pattern of the speakers and addressees. It was found that while addressee responses on their own did not influence vicarious word learning (Experiment 1), they did influence vicarious word learning …
Discourse markers in writing
Words like well, oh, and you know have long been observed and studied in spontaneous speech. With the proliferation of on-line dialogues, such as instant messaging between friends or back-and-forth postings at websites, there are increasing opportunities to observe them in spontaneous writing. In Experiment 1, the interpretation of discourse markers in on-line debates was compared to proposed functions of those markers identified in other setting…
Quotation as a multimodal construction
More on language mode
Language mode theory proposes that language activation can span from a monolingual mode (predominant activation of one language) to bilingual mode (both languages activated). While some argue that linguistic performance is influenced by the language mode the bilingual speaker is in, others have found that language mode activation has no affect on performance. We show that changes in language mode can influence bilinguals’ language processing. Spa…
Addressee backchannels steer narrative development
Brief addressee responses such as uh huh, oh, and wow, which are called backchannels, are typically considered reactive phenomena - devices that respond in various ways to what was just said. Addressees, in providing backchannels, actively shape story telling in spontaneous dialogue (Bavelas et al., 2000). We contrasted generic backchannels with context-sensitive specific backchannels within a collection of face-to-face dialogues and in a narrati…
Communicative Effectiveness of Written Versus Spoken Feedback
How does written and spoken feedback influence communicators' effectiveness in a shared task? Groups of two to four participants engaged in a referential communication task. The director described an array of shapes to the rest of the group via streaming video chat. In each group, one to three matchers attempted to arrange cards depicting those shapes into the director's arrangement. In one condition, matchers could speak to each other and the di…
Social factors affect quotative choice
Discourse Markers across Speakers and Settings
Viewing discourse markers as one of a class of signals that communicators use to manage conversation can help make sense of the varied and contradictory functions ascribed to them. Issues for further testing include demonstrating that speakers and listeners ascribe particular functions to particular markers, tracking the development of these functions as children age, tracking how these functions are adopted by second language learners, and docum…
A quick, gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale
The lack of consistency in how bilingual language dominance is assessed currently impedes cross-experiment comparisons (Grosjean, 1998). We present a paper-and-pencil dominance scale that can be used to quantify the language dominancy of bilingual participants. The scale targets three main criteria important in gauging dominance (Grosjean, 1998; Flege, Mackay & Piske, 2002): percent of language use for both languages, age of acquisition and age o…
Overhearing Single and Multiple Perspectives
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 Fox Tree, J. E. 1999. Listening in on monologues and dialogues. Discourse Processes, 27: 35–53. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science …
Basic meanings of you know and I mean
Is there an Ironic Tone of Voice
Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an ironic tone of voice. Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in written form, revealed only a difference in amplitude variability compared to matched nonironic speech from the same…
Addressee backchannels steer narrative development
Brief addressee responses such as uh huh, oh, and wow, which are called backchannels, are typically considered reactive phenomena - devices that respond in various ways to what was just said. Addressees, in providing backchannels, actively shape story telling in spontaneous dialogue (Bavelas et al., 2000). We contrasted generic backchannels with context-sensitive specific backchannels within a collection of face-to-face dialogues and in a narrati…
Interpreting Pauses and Ums at Turn Exchanges
In 3 experiments, this article compares how overhearers interpreted second speakers' contributions to a conversation depending on whether the second speaker responded to a first speaker immediately; paused and responded; said um and responded; or said um, paused, and then responded. The conversational snippets tested were unscripted and diverse; an example of one exchange is, "Are you here because of affirmative action?" (pause, um, or both) "It …
Listening in on monologues and dialogues
A study compared the communicative effectiveness of spontaneous monologues and dialogues on nonparticipating addressees overhearing talk. Overhearers were more accurate at following instructions in a referential communication task when listening in on dialogues than when listening in on monologues. Several extraneous variables could not account for the result. Two explanations for overhearers’ better performances on the dialogues are that the gre…
Placing like in telling stories
The discourse marker use of the word like (‘we hitch a ride out of there with uh this like one crazy like music major guy’) is considered by many to be superfluously sprinkled into talk, a bad habit best avoided. But a comparison of the use of like in successive tellings of stories demonstrates that like can be anticipated in advance and planned into stories. In this way, like is similar to other words and phrases tellers recycle during story tel…
Quotation as a multimodal construction
Discourse Markers across Speakers and Settings
Viewing discourse markers as one of a class of signals that communicators use to manage conversation can help make sense of the varied and contradictory functions ascribed to them. Issues for further testing include demonstrating that speakers and listeners ascribe particular functions to particular markers, tracking the development of these functions as children age, tracking how these functions are adopted by second language learners, and docum…
Communicative Effectiveness of Written Versus Spoken Feedback
How does written and spoken feedback influence communicators' effectiveness in a shared task? Groups of two to four participants engaged in a referential communication task. The director described an array of shapes to the rest of the group via streaming video chat. In each group, one to three matchers attempted to arrange cards depicting those shapes into the director's arrangement. In one condition, matchers could speak to each other and the di…
Overhearing Single and Multiple Perspectives
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 Fox Tree, J. E. 1999. Listening in on monologues and dialogues. Discourse Processes, 27: 35–53. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science …
The Rise of Like in Spontaneous Quotations
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 use corresponds to an increasing desire to explicitly indicate slippage between the words used in a report and…
Reciprocity in Instant Messaging Conversations
We tested how the introduction and removal of well-defined roles influenced contribution behaviors in instant messaging conversations. Pairs of participants worked on a referential communication task where one participant (the director) had more information than the other (the matcher). Next, these roles were removed and the participants were allowed to communicate freely. Participants then switched director/matcher roles and the procedure was re…
Reciprocity in Conversation
This work provides initial evidence of reciprocity in conversation. We tested whether conversations with contribution imbalances brought on by task demands contained attempts to redress the created imbalance. Pairs of participants identified public art via phone communication. One member of the pair, the director, gave instructions using a map while the other, the follower, walked around a small town finding public art pieces. Later, trained rate…
Social factors affect quotative choice
Overhearing Dialogues and Monologues: How Does Entrainment Lead to More Comprehensible Referring Expressions
People overhearing referential communication understand more when they listen in on dialogues rather than monologues. Some have proposed this is because entrainment selects better referential expressions. In a corpus analysis, we considered the role of addressees in contributing to entrainment and measured the degree to which particular perspectives were used across different speakers in dialogues and monologues. In a test of overhearer comprehen…
Discourse markers in writing
Words like well, oh, and you know have long been observed and studied in spontaneous speech. With the proliferation of on-line dialogues, such as instant messaging between friends or back-and-forth postings at websites, there are increasing opportunities to observe them in spontaneous writing. In Experiment 1, the interpretation of discourse markers in on-line debates was compared to proposed functions of those markers identified in other setting…
The Sarchasm: Sarcasm Production and Identification in Spontaneous Conversation
We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed a task designed to elicit sarcasm, although no instruction to produce sarcastic content was provided…
Building Syntactic Structure in Speaking
In Pursuit of a Good Conversation: How Contribution Balance, Common Ground, and Conversational Closings Influence Conversation Assessment and Conversational Memory
How do people determine whether a conversation is good or bad? Do conversational phenomena (reaching common ground, striving to contribute equally, successful conversational closings) influence judgments of conversation quality and recall of conversations? We tested whether individuals reading previously transcribed conversations considered psycholinguistic characteristics in their assessments of whether the conversations were good or bad. Additi…
The Effects of False Starts and Repetitions on the Processing of Subsequent Words in Spontaneous Speech
Listening in on monologues and dialogues
A study compared the communicative effectiveness of spontaneous monologues and dialogues on nonparticipating addressees overhearing talk. Overhearers were more accurate at following instructions in a referential communication task when listening in on dialogues than when listening in on monologues. Several extraneous variables could not account for the result. Two explanations for overhearers’ better performances on the dialogues are that the gre…
Building Syntactic Structure in Speaking
Recognizing Verbal Irony in Spontaneous Speech
We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this information, in addition to context, when interpreting …
Interpreting Pauses and Ums at Turn Exchanges
In 3 experiments, this article compares how overhearers interpreted second speakers' contributions to a conversation depending on whether the second speaker responded to a first speaker immediately; paused and responded; said um and responded; or said um, paused, and then responded. The conversational snippets tested were unscripted and diverse; an example of one exchange is, "Are you here because of affirmative action?" (pause, um, or both) "It …
Basic meanings of you know and I mean
Is there an Ironic Tone of Voice
Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an ironic tone of voice. Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in written form, revealed only a difference in amplitude variability compared to matched nonironic speech from the same…
Placing like in telling stories
The discourse marker use of the word like (‘we hitch a ride out of there with uh this like one crazy like music major guy’) is considered by many to be superfluously sprinkled into talk, a bad habit best avoided. But a comparison of the use of like in successive tellings of stories demonstrates that like can be anticipated in advance and planned into stories. In this way, like is similar to other words and phrases tellers recycle during story tel…
Folk notions of um and uh, you know, and like
The current study measures laypeople's uses of um , uh , you know , and like , including folk notions of meanings, self-assessments of use, history of discussing use, and attitudes toward the words. Unlike the prevalent idea in the popular press that these discourse markers are interchangeable speaker production flaws, respondents in this study demonstrated that people do possess folk notions of meanings and uses that dramatically distinguish mar…
The Rise of Like in Spontaneous Quotations
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 use corresponds to an increasing desire to explicitly indicate slippage between the words used in a report and…
Overhearing Single and Multiple Perspectives
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 Fox Tree, J. E. 1999. Listening in on monologues and dialogues. Discourse Processes, 27: 35–53. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science …
A quick, gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale
The lack of consistency in how bilingual language dominance is assessed currently impedes cross-experiment comparisons (Grosjean, 1998). We present a paper-and-pencil dominance scale that can be used to quantify the language dominancy of bilingual participants. The scale targets three main criteria important in gauging dominance (Grosjean, 1998; Flege, Mackay & Piske, 2002): percent of language use for both languages, age of acquisition and age o…
Discourse Markers across Speakers and Settings
Viewing discourse markers as one of a class of signals that communicators use to manage conversation can help make sense of the varied and contradictory functions ascribed to them. Issues for further testing include demonstrating that speakers and listeners ascribe particular functions to particular markers, tracking the development of these functions as children age, tracking how these functions are adopted by second language learners, and docum…
Social factors affect quotative choice
Communicative Effectiveness of Written Versus Spoken Feedback
How does written and spoken feedback influence communicators' effectiveness in a shared task? Groups of two to four participants engaged in a referential communication task. The director described an array of shapes to the rest of the group via streaming video chat. In each group, one to three matchers attempted to arrange cards depicting those shapes into the director's arrangement. In one condition, matchers could speak to each other and the di…
More on language mode
Language mode theory proposes that language activation can span from a monolingual mode (predominant activation of one language) to bilingual mode (both languages activated). While some argue that linguistic performance is influenced by the language mode the bilingual speaker is in, others have found that language mode activation has no affect on performance. We show that changes in language mode can influence bilinguals’ language processing. Spa…
Addressee backchannels steer narrative development
Brief addressee responses such as uh huh, oh, and wow, which are called backchannels, are typically considered reactive phenomena - devices that respond in various ways to what was just said. Addressees, in providing backchannels, actively shape story telling in spontaneous dialogue (Bavelas et al., 2000). We contrasted generic backchannels with context-sensitive specific backchannels within a collection of face-to-face dialogues and in a narrati…
Discourse markers in writing
Words like well, oh, and you know have long been observed and studied in spontaneous speech. With the proliferation of on-line dialogues, such as instant messaging between friends or back-and-forth postings at websites, there are increasing opportunities to observe them in spontaneous writing. In Experiment 1, the interpretation of discourse markers in on-line debates was compared to proposed functions of those markers identified in other setting…
Quotation as a multimodal construction
The role of addressee backchannels and conversational grounding in vicarious word learning in four-year-olds
Children successfully learn words through overhearing others engaged in verbal interactions. The current studies investigated the degree to which four-year-old overhearers are influenced by the response behaviors of addressees and by the interactional pattern of the speakers and addressees. It was found that while addressee responses on their own did not influence vicarious word learning (Experiment 1), they did influence vicarious word learning …
Overhearing Dialogues and Monologues: How Does Entrainment Lead to More Comprehensible Referring Expressions
People overhearing referential communication understand more when they listen in on dialogues rather than monologues. Some have proposed this is because entrainment selects better referential expressions. In a corpus analysis, we considered the role of addressees in contributing to entrainment and measured the degree to which particular perspectives were used across different speakers in dialogues and monologues. In a test of overhearer comprehen…
The Sarchasm: Sarcasm Production and Identification in Spontaneous Conversation
We tested sarcasm production and identification across original communicators in a spontaneously produced conversational setting, including testing the role of synchronous movement on sarcasm production and identification. Before communicating, stranger dyads participated in either a synchronous or nonsynchronous movement task. They then completed a task designed to elicit sarcasm, although no instruction to produce sarcastic content was provided…
Lexical divergence in collaborative creativity
Psychological distance in mobile telepresence
Reciprocity in Conversation
This work provides initial evidence of reciprocity in conversation. We tested whether conversations with contribution imbalances brought on by task demands contained attempts to redress the created imbalance. Pairs of participants identified public art via phone communication. One member of the pair, the director, gave instructions using a map while the other, the follower, walked around a small town finding public art pieces. Later, trained rate…
Psychology (33 works) · Linguistics (31 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (22 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (19 works) · Communication (18 works) · Communication (13 works) · Speech and dialogue systems (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Conversation (11 works)