Abstract
As conversation is the most important way of using language, linguists and psychologists should combine forces to investigate how interlocutors deal with the cognitive demands arising during conversation. Linguistic analyses of corpora of conversation are needed to understand the structure of conversations, and experimental work is indispensable for understanding the underlying cognitive processes. We argue that joint consideration of corpus and experimental data is most informative when the utterances elicited in a lab experiment match those extracted from a corpus in relevant ways. This requirement to compare like with like seems obvious but is not trivial to achieve. To illustrate this approach, we report two experiments where responses to polar (yes/no) questions were elicited in the lab and the response latencies were compared to gaps between polar questions and answers in a corpus of conversational speech. We found, as expected, that responses were given faster when they were easy to plan and planning could be initiated earlier than when they were harder to plan and planning was initiated later. Overall, in all but one condition, the latencies were longer than one would expect based on the analyses of corpus data. We discuss the implication of this partial match between the data sets and more generally how corpus and experimental data can best be combined in studies of conversation.
Highlights
As far as we know, conversation exists in all cultures and is the most common way of using language (Levinson, 2016)
The main goal of the study was to examine whether the response latencies in the monochrome condition, where planning could begin about 500 ms before the end of the question, would correspond to the typical gap durations observed for polar questions in Dutch conversations
In order to understand the cognitive processes occurring when language is used in conversation both careful analyses of corpora of natural conversations and experimental investigations are needed
Summary
As far as we know, conversation exists in all cultures and is the most common way of using language (Levinson, 2016). Because of the obvious social importance of conversation, language scientists should study its properties and the cognitive processes making it possible. Much of our current knowledge about conversation is based on analyses of corpora of recorded everyday conversations. These studies have led to important insights into the linguistic properties and structure of conversation. We argue in this paper that the cognitive processes occurring in the interlocutors’ minds can only be fully understood when they are studied through experimental research. The main aim of the present paper is to illustrate how corpus analyses and experimental psycholinguistics can complement each other in research on conversation
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