410 JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY
the current work yield significant differences between actual and
randomized repetitions, which support the inference that
significant engagement has happened, giving more certainty to
attributions of mutual understanding,^50 thereby supporting the
face validity of the methods. Further, recall that face validity is
found elsewhere, in the correlation between repetition levels and
task success in task-based dialogue.^51
The capacity to assess and attain mutual understanding from
a position external to a dialogue is important outside forensic
contexts. The capacity to reliably and objectively make such
attributions is also relevant in clinical diagnostics. Moreover,
even if repetition behaviors do not figure explicitly into
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual diagnoses of schizophrenia,
analysis of repetition figures into current concepts of
schizophrenia,^52 including attention to whether such analyses can
lead to inappropriate diagnoses.^53 In preliminary study in this
(describing an experiment in when subjects listened to short dialogue
fragments and judged what was actually intended by the elliptical
clarification, based on prosodic features); Jens Edlund et al., User Responses
to Prosodic Variation in Fragmentary Grounding Utterances in Dialog,
PROC. INTERSPEECH 2006, at 2002 (testing whether subjects change their
behavior to different fragmentary grounding utterances in a human-computer
dialogue setting).
(^50) Vogel & Behan, supra note 25.
(^51) See Reitter & Moore, supra note 25, at 808–15.
(^52) See generally Michael Covington et al., Schizophrenia and the
Structure of Language: The Linguist’s View, 77 SCHIZOPHRENIA RES. 85, 85–
98 (2005) (evaluating schizophrenic language impairments to see how
schizophrenia affects phonology, syntax and semantics); Gina R. Kuperberg,
Language in Schizophrenia Part 1: An Introduction, 4 LANGUAGE &
LINGUISTICS COMPASS 576, 576–89 (2010) (discussing language output in
schizophrenia and the theory that language dysfunction in schizophrenia arises
from abnormalities in semantic memory and/or working memory and
executive function); Gina R. Kuperberg, Language in Schizophrenia Part 2:
What Can Psycholinguistics Bring to the Study of Schizophrenia... and Vice
Versa?, 4 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS COMPASS 576, 590–604 (2010)
(applying online psycholinguistic methods to schizophrenic language).
(^53) See Susan Trumbetta et al., Language-Related Symptoms in Persons
with Schizophrenia and How Deaf Persons May Manifest These Symptoms, 1
SIGN LANGUAGE STUDIES 214, 228–53 (2001).