Initiation of utterance planning in response to pre-recorded and “live” utterances

Abstract

In everyday conversation, interlocutors often plan their utterances while listening to their conversational partners, thereby achieving short gaps between their turns. Important issues for current psycholinguistics are how interlocutors distribute their attention between listening and speech planning and how speech planning is timed relative to listening. Laboratory studies addressing these issues have used a variety of paradigms, some of which have involved using recorded speech to which participants responded, whereas others have involved interactions with confederates. This study investigated how this variation in the speech input affected the participants’ timing of speech planning. In Experiment 1, participants responded to utterances produced by a confederate, who sat next to them and looked at the same screen. In Experiment 2, they responded to recorded utterances of the same confederate. Analyses of the participants’ speech, their eye movements, and their performance in a concurrent tapping task showed that, compared with recorded speech, the presence of the confederate increased the processing load for the participants, but did not alter their global sentence planning strategy. These results have implications for the design of psycholinguistic experiments and theories of listening and speaking in dyadic settings.

The role of corrective feedback and lexical guidance in perceptual learning of a novel L2 accent in dialogue

“…Our study was not specifically designed to test the effect of cognitive load on perceptual learning. However, other researchers have found that speaking with a physically co-present interlocutor involves a higher cognitive processing load than speaking in response to prerecorded utterances (Sjerps et al, 2020). Thus, our experiment's face-to-face setting might well have induced a higher processing load than the computer player setting, yet still it led to equivalent perceptual learning.…”

Forgotten Little Words: How Backchannels and Particles May Facilitate Speech Planning in Conversation?

“…Nevertheless, given their high frequency, at least some function words may be faster to plan than content words. This is important because in earlier work, gap durations in conversation have often been compared to speech production latencies for nouns, specifically picture names (e.g., Garrod and Pickering, 2015;Levinson and Torreira, 2015;Barthel et al, 2016;Bögels et al, 2018;Barthel and Sauppe, 2019;Sjerps et al, 2020), and relative to these latencies gaps in conversation are very short. This comparison may be misleading as it ignores the difference in word class and any related differences in the speech planning processes.…”

“…(late cue) versus "Are dogs your favorite animals?" (early cue); see also Corps et al, 2019], and in several studies where participants and confederates took turns describing objects on their screens (e.g., Sjerps and Meyer, 2015;Barthel et al, 2016;Meyer et al, 2018;Sjerps et al, 2020). All of these studies found faster responses when the cue to the answer appeared early rather than late in the question, indicating that, when possible, participants began to plan the answer during the question.…”

“…They found that the participants responded faster when the cue to the answer appeared early in the question, as in “Which character, also called 007, appeared in the famous movie?” than when it appeared later, as in “Which character from the famous movies is also called 007?” (see also Bögels et al, 2018 ). Similar results were obtained in a study by Corps et al (2018) , where participants answered knowledge questions and questions about their personal experience [e.g., “Have you ever been to the city of Paris?” (late cue) versus “Are dogs your favorite animals?” (early cue); see also Corps et al, 2019 ], and in several studies where participants and confederates took turns describing objects on their screens (e.g., Sjerps and Meyer, 2015 ; Barthel et al, 2016 ; Meyer et al, 2018 ; Sjerps et al, 2020 ). All of these studies found faster responses when the cue to the answer appeared early rather than late in the question, indicating that, when possible, participants began to plan the answer during the question.…”

A tool for efficient and accurate segmentation of speech data: announcing POnSS

“…We designed a baseline task that is typical for the type of segmentation projects that are conducted for production data in psycholinguistics (for instance, Zormpa et al 2019;Sjerps et al 2019), combining forced-alignment and Praat TextGrid annotation.…”