Mental chronometry of speaking in dialogue: Semantic interference turns into facilitation

Kuhlen, Anna K.; Rahman, Rasha Abdel

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104962

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…In addition, all of the tasks required participants to make inferences about the mental states of anonymous others (often even nonreal avatars) as a third-party observer; these isolated contexts do not reflect the complexity and dynamic nature of real-life social interaction. Interactivity is known to alter sensitivity to others' perspectives and influence communication success (Kuhlen & Abdel Rahman, 2022; Surtees, Apperly, & Samson, 2016). Thus, future research is needed to test the extent to which findings in these controlled contexts truly reflect real-life interaction with co-present others (as in De Lillo et al, 2021), and whether older adults might particularly benefit from these interactive social contexts that motivate them to engage with others more closely (Hess, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perspective-taking and social inferences in adolescents, young adults, and older adults.

Lillo¹,

Ferguson²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Taking another person's perspective provides a means to infer their beliefs and intentions (known as Theory of Mind), which is an essential part of social interaction. In this article, we examined how different subcomponents of perspective-taking change beyond childhood in a large sample (N = 263) of adolescents, young adults, and older adults, and tested the degree to which age-related changes in perspective-taking are mediated by executive functions. Participants completed three tasks that assessed: (a) the likelihood of making social inferences, (b) judgments about an avatar's visual and spatial perspective, and (c) their ability to use an avatar's visual perspective to assign reference in language. Results revealed that while the likelihood of correctly inferring others' mental states increased linearly between adolescence and older adulthood (likely reflecting accumulating social experience over the lifespan), the ability to judge an avatar's perspective and use this to assign reference was subject to developmental changes from adolescence to older age, with performance peaking in young adulthood. Correlation and mediation analyses incorporated three measures of executive functioning (inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) and revealed that executive functions contribute to perspective-taking ability in these tasks (particularly during development), but largely do not mediate the effect of age on perspective-taking. We discuss how these results fit with models of mentalizing that predict distinct patterns of social development depending on the maturation of cognitive and language mechanisms.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perspective-taking and social inferences in adolescents, young adults, and older adults.

Lillo¹,

Ferguson²

2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…For example, when their task is to produce one utterance, they may inhibit their simulation of another utteranceaccounting for the undetailed nature of co-representation when participants are concurrently engaged in a language production task. Such inhibition of detailed co-representation may be benefical in communicative contexts, where it may help facilitate conceptual processing (see Kuhlen & Abdel Rahman, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this reduction in the magnitude of the semantic interference effect only occurred when the distractor words were presented in case-alternating font, suggesting that representation of the partner's utterances can sometimes help participants ignore distracting information that is task-relevant for the partner, but only when processing of that information is made less automatic (in contrast, when the words were presented in regular font, or when participants believed their partner was naming the color of the pictures, comparable levels of interference were found in joint and individual versions). Finally, Kuhlen and Abdel Rahman (2022) found that when the PWI task is embedded in a communicative game, with one participant naming the distractor words and the other, co-present, participant naming the pictures, semantic interference is also greatly reduced (compared to a non-communicative, standard version of the PWI task). They suggested that naming pictures in a communicative setting may enhance semantic 13 facilitation at the conceptual level (due to distractor and target belonging to the same semantic category).…”

Section: Joint Stroop and Joint Picture-word Interference Tasksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Joint Language Production and The Representation of Other Speakers' Utterances

Gambi¹,

Pickering²

2023

Language Production

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Joint language production and the representation of other speakers' utterances.Joint language production is the study of the mechanisms involved in producing language jointly with another real or assumed speaker. Using relevant tasks, researchers have asked how (if at all) speakers represent one another's utterances (which we term co-representation) and specifically examined how such representations affect language production. They have compared the process of producing language jointly to the process of producing language individually, and have done so to address a question that is important for the study of both comprehension and production: How do language production processes relate to the representation of others' utterances? If production processes contribute to co-representation, then we would expect to find that co-representation affects actual language production. We use the term joint language production to refer both to cases where two people speak at the same time and to cases where people take turns speaking (e.g., A names a picture, then B names a picture). Furthermore, we include both situations where speakers are simply aware of each other's tasks (e.g., Gambi et al., 2015a;Kuhlen & Abdel Rahman, 2017) and situations where speakers intend to coordinate with each other, such as in choric production (Cummins, 2003(Cummins, , 2009Jasmin et al., 2016), or when they are instructed to jointly construct a meaningful sentence (e.g., Lelonkiewicz & Gambi, 2020) or to minimize the silent pause between their utterances (e.g., Hoedemaker & Meyer, 2018).Importantly, we use it to refer not only to situations where two people are actually producing, but also to instances when one participant produces while believing that another person is also producing (whether the participant receives any feedback about their partner's production or not, or even whether there is a real partner or not). Finally, speaking individually (the other side of the comparison) can refer either to one speaker performing just half of the joint production task (e.g., A names a picture, but then nobody speaks) or to one speaker performing the whole of the task (e.g., A names a picture, and then names another picture). Throughout the chapter, we specify exactly what is meant by "jointly" and "individually" with reference to particular studies, but we first explain the theoretical importance of this comparison and thus the unique contribution made by this literature.

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“…In addition, it is essential for assessing the scope of psycholinguistic processing models of speaking and listening. These models are largely based on experimental work carried out in laboratory environments, which differ in many ways from the environments where conversations are typically held ( Kandylaki & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2019 ; Kuhlen, Bogler, Brennan, & Haynes, 2017 ; Kuhlen & Rahman, 2022 ; Sjerps, Decuyper, & Meyer, 2019 ; Verga & Kotz, 2019 ). For instance, rather than conversing with another person, participants in lab experiments are typically tested individually, and they produce utterances in monologues or respond to recorded utterances.…”

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confidence: 99%

Timing in Conversation

Meyer

2023

Journal of Cognition

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Turn-taking in everyday conversation is fast, with median latencies in corpora of conversational speech often reported to be under 300 ms. This seems like magic, given that experimental research on speech planning has shown that speakers need much more time to plan and produce even the shortest of utterances. This paper reviews how language scientists have combined linguistic analyses of conversations and experimental work to understand the skill of swift turn-taking and proposes a tentative solution to the riddle of fast turn-taking.

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Mental chronometry of speaking in dialogue: Semantic interference turns into facilitation

Cited by 6 publications

References 57 publications

Perspective-taking and social inferences in adolescents, young adults, and older adults.

Perspective-taking and social inferences in adolescents, young adults, and older adults.

Joint Language Production and The Representation of Other Speakers' Utterances

Timing in Conversation

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