While studies have shown the importance of listener feedback in dialogue, we still know little about the factors that impact its quality. Feedback can indicate either that the addressee is aligning with the speaker (i.e. ‘positive’ feedback) or that there is some communicative trouble (i.e. ‘negative’ feedback). This study provides an in-depth account of listener feedback in task-oriented dialogue (a director–matcher game), where positive and negative feedback is produced, thus expressing both alignment and misalignment. By manipulating the listener’s cognitive load through a secondary mental task, we measure the effect of divided attention on the quantity and quality of feedback. Our quantitative analysis shows that performance and feedback quantity remain stable across cognitive load conditions, but that the timing and novelty of feedback vary: turns are produced after longer pauses when attention is divided between two speech-focused tasks, and they are more economical (i.e. include more other-repetitions) when unrelated words need to be retained in memory. These findings confirm that cognitive load impacts the quality of listener feedback. Finally, we found that positive feedback is more often generic and shorter than negative feedback and that its proportion increases over time.

中文翻译：

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反馈质量和注意力分散：探索任务导向对话中对齐的评论

虽然研究表明听众反馈在对话中的重要性，但我们对影响其质量的因素仍然知之甚少。反馈可以表明收件人与说话者保持一致（即“积极”反馈），也可以表明存在一些沟通问题（即“消极”反馈）。这项研究深入描述了任务导向对话（导演-匹配者游戏）中的听众反馈，其中产生了积极和消极的反馈，从而表达了对齐和错位。通过次要心理任务操纵听者的认知负荷，我们测量了注意力分散对反馈数量和质量的影响。我们的定量分析表明，在认知负荷条件下，表现和反馈数量保持稳定，但反馈的时间和新颖性有所不同：当注意力分散在两个以语音为中心的任务之间时，较长的停顿后会产生轮流，并且它们更经济（即当不相关的单词需要保留在记忆中时，包括更多的其他重复）。这些发现证实认知负荷会影响听众反馈的质量。最后，我们发现正面反馈比负面反馈更普遍、更简短，而且其比例随着时间的推移而增加。