Abstract
In conversation, interlocutors rarely leave long gaps between turns, suggesting that next speakers begin to plan their turns while listening to the previous speaker. The present experiment used analyses of speech onset latencies and eye-movements in a task-oriented dialogue paradigm to investigate when speakers start planning their responses. German speakers heard a confederate describe sets of objects in utterances that either ended in a noun [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad (“I have a door and a bicycle”)] or a verb form [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad besorgt (“I have gotten a door and a bicycle”)], while the presence or absence of the final verb either was or was not predictable from the preceding sentence structure. In response, participants had to name any unnamed objects they could see in their own displays with utterances such as Ich habe ein Ei (“I have an egg”). The results show that speakers begin to plan their turns as soon as sufficient information is available to do so, irrespective of further incoming words.
Highlights
Most psycholinguistic studies are directed at detailed processes in either comprehension or production, testing single participants in isolation
Given the known latencies involved in speech production of 600 ms or more for a single word in picture naming tasks (Levelt, 1989; Jescheniak et al, 2003; Indefrey and Levelt, 2004; Strijkers and Costa, 2011) and over 1500 ms for simple sentences in scene description tasks (Griffin and Bock, 2000; Schnur et al, 2006), this brief interval between turns will often not allow speakers
The model accounts for short gaps between turns by assuming that content planning starts as early as possible, comprehension continues in parallel with response preparation, and articulation can be launched from a prepared formulation when transition becomes relevant
Summary
Most psycholinguistic studies are directed at detailed processes in either comprehension or production, testing single participants in isolation. Speakers face the task of producing a response under time pressure while keeping capacity demands and interference between comprehension and production within reasonable bounds In their parallel processing model, Pickering and Garrod (2013) propose that fluent turntransitions are made possible by forward modeling of the incoming speech signal with the help of the addressee’s own production system (cf Garrod and Pickering, 2015). In this account, the addressee is taken to covertly imitate the production of the incoming turn based on the input that has already been transmitted and thereby anticipate the content and timing of the incoming turn so as to be able to prepare a response in a timely fashion. Irrespective of whether or not the production system is used to imitate the incoming turn, early anticipation of the incoming turn’s message and intended action would be a necessary pre-requisite for early response preparation
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