Rationale S3: How many people are typically involved in interactions between Focus Group and Neighbour Group when interacting in domain X?

  • Practically always under 5 people
  • Often under 5 people
  • Sometimes under 5 people
  • Rarely under 5 people
  • Practically never under 5 people

Goal

This question is closely tied to the notion of esoteric vs. exoteric communication (Thurston 1987; Wray & Grace 2007). The hypothesis is that esoteric communication is common in small groups with high amounts of interpersonal communication and shared norms. These communication patterns are hypothesised to result in certain kinds of interaction styles and linguistic patterns. In contrast, exoteric communication is thought to be common in larger groups where people will likely interact with complete strangers, which will beget interaction and linguistic patterns that are different to those of esoteric communication. These broad communication types are hypothesised as impacting the evolution of different linguistic structures. Dyad vs group communication is one way to characterise this distinction in communication types.

Definitions

  • Dyadic communication: Models of dyadic communication are described as taking place “between pairs engaged in a tightly coupled collaborative process aimed at establishing a mutual understanding of what is being discussed” (Fay et al. 2000: 481). The notion overlaps heavily with a dialogic model of communication (e.g. dialogue-like communication). Schober & Clark (1989) demonstrated that people who overhear dialogue understand much less of what is being communicated than the people who are engaged in the dialogue. In other words, we are using the term dyadic somewhat synonymously to the term interpersonal in social psychology (Simpson 2007: 588).
  • Group-based communication: Characterised as being broad-cast like, and a monologic style of communication. In this model, “Each speaker… broadcasts his or her message to all the other members of the group… Those who speak the most at the meeting broadcast the most information to the rest of the group.” (Fay et al. 2000: 481). In such communicative contexts, explicit work must be done by the speaker to establish common ground.

The scale is as following:

  • Practically always under 5 people: e.g. up to 90% of the time up
  • Often under 5 people: e.g up to 70% of the time
  • Sometimes under 5 people: up to 50% of the time up
  • Rarely under 5 people: up to 30% of the time
  • Practically never under 5 people: up to 10% of the time

Theoretical Support

Communicative pressures of dyadic vs group-like interactions are different, and have consequences over time for how a communicative system changes (cf. Atkinson et al. 2018). Dyadic vs group-like interaction is also found to affect how individuals are influenced by others. Experimental work by Fay et al. (2000) found that dialogue-like interaction show dyad members being influenced most by those with whom they interact in the discussion, while group-based communication is more monologue like, members are influenced most by the dominant speaker. This would have consequences for modelling the diffusion and adoption of linguistic innovations through a social network.

What exactly constitutes a dyad-like vs group like configuration varies across studies. For example different experiments choose different thresholds. The Fay et al. (2000) experiment had up to 5 people for the dyadic condition, and over 10 as the group condition. Atkinson et al. (2018) did their experiments on pairs vs triads to test for emergence of communicative conventions. Fay & Ellison (2013) have a pairs vs group of eight set up for their iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of population size.

We have chosen to follow the Fay et al. (2000) set up, defining dyad-like as a group of up to five people, while groups of over five are considered more “group like” (see Fay et al. (2000) for empirically grounded rationale). We have chosen this number since real-life interactions of people are rarely completely dyadic, so we surmised that a number of people which still produced a dyad-like effect is sufficient to capture the intended effect of the esoteric communicative condition.

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