Utterance planning and resource allocation in dialogue
Natural conversations are characterized by smooth
transitions of turns between interlocutors. For instance,
speakers often respond to questions or requests within
half a second. As planning the first word of an utterance
can easily take a second or more, this suggests that
utterance planning often overlaps with listening to the
preceding speaker's utterance. A specific proposal
concerning the temporal coordination of listening and
speech planning has recently been made by Levinson and
Torreira (2016, Frontiers in Psychology; Levinson, 2016,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences). They propose that
speakers initiate their speech planning as soon as they
have understood the speech act and gist of the preceding
utterance.
However, direct evidence for simultaneous listening and
speech planning is scarce. I will first review studies
demonstrating that both comprehending spoken utterances
and planning them require processing capacity and that
these processes can substantially interfere with each other.
These data suggest that concurrent speech planning and
listening should be cognitively quite challenging. In the
second part of the talk I will turn to studies examining
directly when utterance planning in dialogue begins.
These studies indicate that (regrettably) there are probably
no hard-and-fast rules for the temporal coordination of
listening and speech planning. I will argue that
(regrettably again) we need models that are far more
complex than Levinson and Torreira's proposal to
understand how listening and speech planning are
coordinated in conversation
Publication type
TalkPublication date
2016
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