Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Dec 1:7:1858.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01858. eCollection 2016.

The Timing of Utterance Planning in Task-Oriented Dialogue: Evidence from a Novel List-Completion Paradigm

Mathias Barthel  1 , Sebastian Sauppe  2 , Stephen C Levinson  3 , Antje S Meyer  4
Affiliations

The Timing of Utterance Planning in Task-Oriented Dialogue: Evidence from a Novel List-Completion Paradigm

Mathias Barthel et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

In conversation, interlocutors rarely leave long gaps between turns, suggesting that next speakers begin to plan their turns while listening to the previous speaker. The present experiment used analyses of speech onset latencies and eye-movements in a task-oriented dialogue paradigm to investigate when speakers start planning their responses. German speakers heard a confederate describe sets of objects in utterances that either ended in a noun [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad ("I have a door and a bicycle")] or a verb form [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad besorgt ("I have gotten a door and a bicycle")], while the presence or absence of the final verb either was or was not predictable from the preceding sentence structure. In response, participants had to name any unnamed objects they could see in their own displays with utterances such as Ich habe ein Ei ("I have an egg"). The results show that speakers begin to plan their turns as soon as sufficient information is available to do so, irrespective of further incoming words.

Keywords: eye-movements; planning; prediction; production; task-oriented dialogue; timing of turn-taking.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example item displays. (A) confederate display. (B) participant display.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Proportions of looks to the object named first by the participant, time-locked to the onset of the last object noun of the confederate turn (0 ms).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Allopenna P. D., Magnuson J. S., Tanenhaus M. K. (1998). Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: evidence for continuous mapping models. J. Mem. Lang. 38, 419–439. 10.1006/jmla.1997.2558 - DOI
    1. Altmann G. T., Kamide Y. (2007). The real-time mediation of visual attention by language and world knowledge: linking anticipatory (and other) eye movements to linguistic processing. J. Mem. Lang. 57, 502–518. 10.1016/j.jml.2006.12.004 - DOI
    1. Baayen R. H. (2008). Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 10.1017/CBO9780511801686 - DOI
    1. Barr D. J. (2008). Analyzing visual world eyetracking data using multilevel logistic regression. J. Mem. Lang. 59, 457–474. 10.1016/j.jml.2007.09.002 - DOI
    1. Barr D. J. (2013). Random effects structure for testing interactions in linear mixed-effects models. Front. Psychol. 4:328. 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00328 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources