In psycholinguistics, the collaborative model (or conversational model) is a theory for explaining how speaking and understanding work in conversation, specifically how people in conversation coordinate to determine definite references.
The model was initially proposed in 1986 by psycholinguists Herb Clark and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs. It asserts that conversation partners must act collaboratively to reach a mutual understanding – i.e. the speaker must tailor their utterances to better suit the listener, and the listener must indicate to the speaker that they have understood.
In this ongoing process, both conversation partners must work together in order to establish what a given noun phrase is referring to. The referential process can be initiated by the speaker using one of at least six types of noun phrases: the elementary noun phrase, the episodic noun phrase, the installment noun phrase, the provisional noun phrase, the dummy noun phrase, and/or the proxy noun phrase. Once this presentation is made, the listener must accept it either through presupposing acceptance (i.e. letting the speaker continue uninterrupted) or asserting acceptance (i.e. through a continuer such as "yes", okay", or a head nod). The speaker must then acknowledge this signal of acceptance. In this process, presentation and acceptance goes back and forth, and some utterances can simultaneously be both presentations and acceptances. This model also posits that conversationalists strive for minimum collaborative effort by making references based more on permanent properties than temporary properties and by refining perspective on referents through simplification and narrowing .
History
The collaborative model finds its roots in Grice's cooperative principle and four Gricean maxims, theories which prominently established the idea that conversation is a collaborative process between speaker and listener.
However, until the Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs study, the prevailing theory was the literary model (or autonomous model or traditional model). This model likened the process of a speaker establishing reference to an author writing a book to distant readers. In the literary model, the speaker is the one who retains complete control and responsibility over the course of referent determination. The listener, in this theory, simply hears and understands the definite description as if they were reading it and, if successful, figures out the identity of the referent on their own.
This autonomous view of reference establishment wasn't challenged until a paper by D.R. Olson was published in 1970. It was then suggested that there very well could be a collaborative element in the process of establishing reference. Olson, while still holding to the literary model, suggested that speakers select the words they do based on context and what they believe the listener will understand.
Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs
Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs criticized the literary model in their 1986 paper; they asserted that the model failed to account for the dynamic nature of verbal conversations.
“First, in conversation unlike writing, speakers have limited time for planning and revision. They need to overcome this limitation, and in doing so they may exploit techniques possible only in conversational settings. Second, speech is evanescent. The listener has to attend to, hear, and try to understand an utterance at virtually the same time it is being issued. That requires a type of process synchronization not found in reading. And third, listeners in conversations aren’t mute or invisible during an utterance. Speakers may alter what they say midcourse based on what addressees say and do.”
In the same paper, they proposed the Collaborative Model as an alternative. They believed this model was more able to explain the aforementioned features of conversation. They had conducted an experiment to support this theory and also to further determine how the acceptance process worked. The experiment consisted of two participants seated at tables separated by an opaque screen. On the tables in front of each participant were a series of Tangram figures arranged in different orders. One participant, called the director, was tasked with getting the other participant, 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 individuals, playing the same roles.