Collaborative Model - Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs

Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs

The paper produced by this duo in 1986 criticized the literary model and instead presented an opposing process of reference establishment that they called the collaborative model.

The pair conducted an experiment to support their theory and further determine how the acceptance process worked.

The experiment consisted of two students, seated at tables separated by an opaque screen. On the tables in front of each student were a series of Tangram figures arranged in different orders. One student, called the director, was charged with getting the other student, called the matcher, to accurately match his configuration of figures through conversation alone. This process was to be repeated 5 additional times by the same students, playing the same roles.

The collaborative model they proposed allowed them to make several predictions about what would happen. They predicted that it would take the two subjects many more words to establish reference the first time, as they would need to use nonstandard noun phrases that required back and forth collaboration to determine which figures were being talked about. Later references to the same figures, they hypothesized, would take shorter amounts of words, because they could rely more often on established standard noun phrases to refer and because at that point definite reference had been mutually established.

The results of the study confirmed many of their beliefs, and outlined some of the processes of collaborative reference, including establishing the types of noun phrases used in presentation, and their frequency.