During conversation, there is often little gap between interlocutors' utterances. In two pairs of experiments, we manipulated the content predictability of yes/no questions to investigate whether listeners achieve such coordination by (i) preparing a response as early as possible or (ii) predicting the end of the speaker's turn. To assess these two mechanisms, we varied the participants' task: They either pressed a button when they thought the question was about to end (Experiments 1a and 2a), or verbally answered the questions with either yes or no (Experiments 1b and 2b). Predictability effects were present when participants had to prepare a verbal response, but not when they had to predict the turn-end. These findings suggest content prediction facilitates turn-taking because it allows listeners to prepare their own response early, rather than because it helps them predict when the speaker will reach the end of their turn.

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During conversation, interlocutors rapidly switch between speaker and listener roles and take turns at talk. How do they achieve such fine coordination? Most research has concentrated on the role of prediction, but listeners must also prepare a response in advance (assuming they wish to respond) and articulate this response at the appropriate moment. Such mechanisms may overlap with the processes of comprehending the speaker's incoming turn and predicting its end. However, little is known about the stages of response preparation and production. We discuss three questions pertaining to such stages: (1) Do listeners prepare their own response in advance?, (2) Can listeners buffer their prepared response?, and (3) Does buffering lead to interference with concurrent comprehension? We argue that fine coordination requires more than just an accurate prediction of the interlocutor's incoming turn: Listeners must also simultaneously prepare their own response.

We thank Sven Mattys for helpful suggestions regarding speech rate manipulations, Nigel Corps for recording stimuli audio, and Max Dunn for acting as second coder for both experiments. AbstractDuring conversation, interlocutors often produce their utterances with little overlap or gap between their turns. But what mechanism underlies this striking ability to time articulation appropriately? In two verbal yes/no question-answering experiments, we investigated whether listeners use the speech rate of questions to time articulation of their answers. In Experiment 1, we orthogonally manipulated the speech rate of the context (e.g., Do you have a…) and final word (e.g., dog?) of questions using time-compression, so that each component was spoken at the natural rate or twice as a fast. Listeners responded earlier when the context was speeded rather than natural, suggesting they used the speaker's context rate to time answer articulation. Additionally, listeners responded earlier when the speaker's final syllable was speeded than natural, regardless of context rate, suggesting they adjusted the timing of articulation after listening to a single syllable produced at a different rate. We replicated this final word effect in Experiment 2, which also showed that our speech rate manipulation did not influence the timing of response preparation. Together, these findings suggest listeners use speech rate information to time articulation when answering questions.