Concurrent cognitions during conversations: Protocol analysis as a means of exploring conversations

Identifying the cognitive activities that occur as individuals interact is critical to understanding conversational processes. Previous attempts to explore people's thoughts as they converse are inherently limited by an inability to tap into concurrent cognitions: those thoughts that occur simultaneously with listening and speaking. We propose and test a procedure to capture these concurrent thoughts by using netwoiied computers where individuals communicate with one another over terminals and simultaneously talk aloud their thoughts. Results demonstrate that this technique can offer evidence of cognitive activities such as inferencing and planning in conversation, as well as bolster the validity of certain conversational maxims that, up to now were assumed, but never actually demonstrated in collaborative discourse.