Pragmatics; *speech Communication IDENTIFIERS *Conversation; Conversational Flow; Salience

The flow of normal conversation is often impeded by error. These errors can be divided into at least three categories: phonological, lexical, and pragmatic. A study was designed to assess whether different kinds of errors affect conversation in different ways. Forty-four subjects listened to tapes of conversations. Each conversation contained either no error or one of the three error types. All subjects heard 12 different conversations. Following the taped conversations, the subjects evaluated the speakers and rated the realism of the conversation. They then engaged in a 2-minute distractor task before being asked to recall the errors. Forty-four additional subjects were asked to read transcripts of the conversations before participating in the remainder of the activities. The immediate evaluations of the participants were most strongly affected by the presence of pragmatic errors. In contrast