title: A procedure for studying online conversational processing using a chat bot.
abstract: This article reports the development of a tool for examining the social and cognitive processes of people involved in a conversational interaction. Research on how people process utterances while they are actually engaged in an interaction has been extremely rare. To that end, we have developed a conversational bot (computer program designed to mimic human communication) with which participants can chat in a format similar to instant messaging. This program allows for the recording of comprehension speed, and it can be interfaced with secondary tasks (e.g., lexical decisions) in order to examine online conversational processing. Additional research possibilities with this program are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Science, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana 47306, USA. 00t0holtgrav@bsu.edu
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Holtgraves
authors.forename: Tai-Lin
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Han
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011584:Psychology / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011930:Reaction Time; D012919:Social Behavior; D013997:Time Factors; D014825:Vocabulary