Evaluating the Timing and Utility of Language in Collaborative Problem-Solving Dialogues

As any group-work member can attest, conveying information, and confirming understanding among group members can be a challenging first step in problem-solving. Despite being a ubiquitous strategy employed in many educational and organizational settings, there are collaborations that fall flat while others succeed. Recent strides have been made in the psycholinguistic approach to communication, evaluating the extent to which speakers align across lexical, syntactic, and semantic usages of language within various task environments, but gaps remain in understanding the role of language in open-ended, emergent problem-solving spaces. Study 1 examines the specific trends and functions of lexical, syntactic, and semantic alignment among speakers in a complex, creative problem-solving effort. As collaborators work through their tasks, lexical alignment decreases as semantic alignment increases and syntactic re-use decreases. These findings suggest alignment may be a sensitive mechanism that hinges on time spent in a collaborative environment and the influencing factor of goal type. More research is needed to understand the varying mechanisms across unique problem-solving spaces that vary in complexity, silence of referents, and cognitive load placed upon performers. Follow-up analyses explore how speakers use specific terms in their collaborative dialogues, assessing the roles of cognition- and action-related language. The use of thinking words (e.g. “think”, “wonder”) predicts when participants may hit an impasse in their collaborations. One interpretation suggests that cognition-related language tends to be involved when groups struggle to convey ideas. Findings from the current work have implications for interventions in organizational and educational domains, along with potential artificial intelligence applications.