Does the addressee's behavior affect utterance planning and articulation? (2012)

Undergraduate: Kayla Finch

Faculty Advisor: Jennifer Arnold
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Audience design and speaker-internal views have been created to understand acoustic variation in dialogue. Arnold et al. (2011) bridged these views as addressees’ behaviors facilitated production processes as speakers began speaking more quickly when the addressee anticipated the speaker’s meaning. However, the addressee either always anticipated or never did. The current study asks whether speakers modulate acoustic reduction as a function of dynamic changes in the addressee’s behavior.
Participants gave instructions to a confederate addressee about where to place objects. The confederate addressee either anticipated and picked up the object before the instruction or waited. Waiting and anticipating trials were intermixed throughout the experiment. Preliminary analysis indicates that speakers began to speak sooner in the anticipating than the waiting conditions. This suggests that speakers react quickly to the addressee’s actions, and use evidence of the addressee’s understanding to inform their production decisions. However, word duration was unaffected by condition.