Abstract
A study compared the communicative effectiveness of spontaneous monologues and dialogues on nonparticipating addressees overhearing talk. Overhearers were more accurate at following instructions in a referential communication task when listening in on dialogues than when listening in on monologues. Several extraneous variables could not account for the result. Two explanations for overhearers’ better performances on the dialogues are that the greater number of discourse markers helps overhearers follow the speech and that the perspectives of multiple interlocutors are more informative than one perspective. Extensions of the collaborative model of language use are discussed.

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