This article compares discourse management strategies in face-to-face and computer-mediated interactions involving four decision-making tasks.  A schema-based approach to discourse processing is adopted which claims that participants will employ the same decision-making routine in both modalities.  However, due to differing constraints in the two modalities, we predict that management strategies should differ across modality.  In particular, the greater effort and attentional demands of computer-mediated communication suggest that  users will attempt to find more efficient ways of communicating.

We examine these issues in qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data using an utterance-unit coding system to identify discourse functions.  The analyses show that participants in computer-mediated interaction encode discourse management functions more explicitly than those in face-to-face interactions.  In addition, there is a clear preference for encoding management functions as first pair-parts of adjacency pairs, which results in utterances that manage turn-taking as well.  The results suggest that participants in electronic communications compensate for decreased efficiency by adopting management strategies that pack more information into fewer utterances, i.e., by relying heavily on the implicit knowledge of a shared problem-solving schema.