Metacommunicative devices in spoken discourse as part of processing distributed cognitive tasks

Types of utterances that belong to meta-levels of activity have been singled out in spoken task-focused dialogues between subjects accomplishing a matching task with no visual contact. The types include activity management and planning, global and local (e.g. signals of activity phase); explicit evaluation of the state of joint project, communicative utterances for conversation management; backchannel response: ation; repair (self-repair, otherrepair); meta-linguistic utterances; meta-communicative utterances having to do with rapport, etiquette, joking, etc. Differences between normal and schizophrenic subjects have been shown in meta-communicative activity supposed to be linked to the management of distributed cognition and creation of shared representations of reality.