Towards Measuring the Cognitive Loads of Different Dialog Acts through Dependency Distance

Abstract

Although relevance theory has called attention to the analysis of cognitive aspects of pragmatic phenomena, few investigations have explored whether distinct dialog acts (DAs) require different degrees of cognitive loads, not to mention examining them with objective indices. The current paper then adopted a syntactic cognitive index – dependency distance – to analyze whether distinct categories of DAs differ in cognitive loads. Specifically, this paper adopted mean dependency distance (MDD), mean hierarchical distance (MHD), and normalized dependency distance (NDD) to examine the language data in the Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus (SwDA). The results showed that MDD, MHD and NDD are all effective in differentiating four genres of DAs – Information Request (IR), Agreement (Ag), Understanding (Un), and Answering (An), among which IR has the highest values of the three indicators, Un has the lowest, and Ag and An are somewhere in between. A follow-up ANOVA further corroborated that the forward DA (IR) significantly differed from the backward ones (Ag, Un, and An). With these results obtained, this paper may shed light on the relationship between DAs and cognitive resources, providing a new perspective for the research under the paradigm of pragmatics.