title: The Timing of Utterance Planning in Task-Oriented Dialogue: Evidence from a Novel List-Completion Paradigm.
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 asIch 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.
authors.affiliation: Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Barthel
authors.affiliation: Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsNijmegen, Netherlands; Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of ZurichZurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Sebastian
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sauppe
authors.affiliation: Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsNijmegen, Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud UniversityNijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Stephen C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Levinson
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud UniversityNijmegen, Netherlands; Psychology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsNijmegen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Antje S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Meyer
keywords: eye-movements; planning; prediction; production; task-oriented dialogue; timing of turn-taking