How Long Does it Take to Say ‘Well’? Evidence from the Audio BNC

Rühlemann, Christoph

doi:10.1007/s41701-018-0046-y

Cited by 45 publications

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References 36 publications

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“…In addition, the "well" is stretched, as indicated by the colon (Hepburn and Bolden, 2013). Stretched turn-initial "well" is especially associated with dispreferred turns (Rühlemann, 2019). Emma predicts that Margy will produce a dispreferred response.…”

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confidence: 99%

Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair

Mertens

Ruiter

2021

dad

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The exact timing of a conversational turn conveys important information to a listener. Most turns are initiated within 250ms after the previous turn. However, interlocutors take longer to initiate certain types of turns: those that either require more cognitive processing or are socially dispreferred. Many dispreferred turns are also cognitively demanding, so it is difficult to attribute specific conversational delays to social or cognitive mechanisms. In this paper, we evaluate the relative contribution of cognitive and social variables to the timing of utterances in conversation. We focus on a type of turn that is socially dispreferred, cognitively demanding, and generally delayed: other-initiations of repair (OIRs). OIRs occur when a listener notices and decides to signal a comprehension problem (e.g., "What?"). We analyzed the Floor Transfer Offsets of 456 OIRs, and found that interlocutors initiated OIRs later when trouble sources had weaker discourse context or were shorter, and when the OIR was more face-threatening. Our results suggest that both cognitive and social variables contribute to the timing of delayed utterances in conversation. We discuss how attention, prediction, planning, and social preference manifest in the timing of turns.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair

Mertens

Ruiter

2021

dad

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“… 11 In the initial positions in turns-at-talk, “well” and also “so” perform a pragmatic function in more than 80% of cases (cf. Rühlemann, 2019 ). For the above analysis, those initial uses have been re-tagged from adverb to interjection.…”

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Word frequency and cognitive effort in turns-at-talk: turn structure affects processing load in natural conversation

Rühlemann,

Barthel

2024

Front. Psychol.

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Frequency distributions are known to widely affect psycholinguistic processes. The effects of word frequency in turns-at-talk, the nucleus of social action in conversation, have, by contrast, been largely neglected. This study probes into this gap by applying corpus-linguistic methods on the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). The latter includes continuous pupil size measures of participants of the recorded conversations, allowing for a systematic investigation of patterns in the contained speech and language on the one hand and their relation to concurrent processing costs they may incur in speakers and recipients on the other hand. We test a first hypothesis in this vein, analyzing whether word frequency distributions within turns-at-talk are correlated with interlocutors' processing effort during the production and reception of these turns. Turns are found to generally show a regular distribution pattern of word frequency, with highly frequent words in turn-initial positions, mid-range frequency words in turn-medial positions, and low-frequency words in turn-final positions. Speakers' pupil size is found to tend to increase during the course of a turn at talk, reaching a climax toward the turn end. Notably, the observed decrease in word frequency within turns is inversely correlated with the observed increase in pupil size in speakers, but not in recipients, with steeper decreases in word frequency going along with steeper increases in pupil size in speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech processing, turn structure, and information packaging. Crucially, we propose that the intensification of processing effort in speakers during a turn at talk is owed to an informational climax, which entails a progression from high-frequency, low-information words through intermediate levels to low-frequency, high-information words. At least in English conversation, interlocutors seem to make use of this pattern as one way to achieve efficiency in conversational interaction, creating a regularly recurring distribution of processing load across speaking turns, which aids smooth turn transitions, content prediction, and effective information transfer.

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Prosodic pragmatics and feedback in intercultural communication

Romero-Trillo

2019

Journal of Pragmatics

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How Long Does it Take to Say ‘Well’? Evidence from the Audio BNC

Cited by 45 publications

References 36 publications

Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair

Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair

Word frequency and cognitive effort in turns-at-talk: turn structure affects processing load in natural conversation

Prosodic pragmatics and feedback in intercultural communication

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