Planning and coordination of utterances in a joint naming task.

Abstract

Dialogue requires speakers to coordinate. According to the model of dialogue as joint action, interlocutors achieve this coordination by corepresenting their own and each other's task share in a functionally equivalent manner. In two experiments, we investigated this corepresentation account using an interactive joint naming task in which pairs of participants took turns naming sets of objects on a shared display. Speaker A named the first, or the first and third object, and Speaker B named the second object. In control conditions, Speaker A named one, two, or all three objects and Speaker B remained silent. We recorded the timing of the speakers' utterances and Speaker A's eye movements. Interturn pause durations indicated that the speakers effectively coordinated their utterances in time. Speaker A's speech onset latencies depended on the number of objects they named, but were unaffected by Speaker B's naming task. This suggests speakers were not fully incorporating their partner's task into their own speech planning. Moreover, Speaker A's eye movements indicated that they were much less likely to attend to objects their partner named than to objects they named themselves. When speakers did inspect their partner's objects, viewing times were too short to suggest that speakers were retrieving these object names as if they were planning to name the objects themselves. These results indicate that speakers prioritized planning their own responses over attending to their interlocutor's task and suggest that effective coordination can be achieved without full corepresentation of the partner's task. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mental representations of partner task cause interference in picture naming

“…We did not observe a significant main effect of partner presence on any dependent measure: speakers did not differ in speed or accuracy based upon partner presence, nor did they look more often at the partner's object when the partner was present than when they were absent. This is consistent with earlier studies in our lab indicating that participants carry out simple picture naming tasks in a similar fashion in monologue and dialogue situations (Hoedemaker & Meyer, 2019;Meyer, Alday, Decuyper, & Knudsen, 2018).…”

“…In combination with other results from joint language paradigms (e.g. Corps, Crossley, Gambi, & Pickering, 2018;Hoedemaker et al, 2017;Hoedemaker & Meyer, 2019;Kuhlen & Rahman, 2017), this suggests that while individuals can represent what the partner will say in fine-grained detail, partial co-representation may often be a useful default.…”

“…Following earlier work (e.g. Gambi et al, 2015;Hoedemaker, Ernst, Meyer, & Belke, 2017;Hoedemaker & Meyer, 2019;Kuhlen & Rahman, 2017), we presented individuals with pictures to name or categorize and varied properties of the partner stimulus, partner task, and whether there was a partner present during the experimental session. We based the paradigm on Gambi et al (2015), making changes to make the social context more obvious, simplify the paradigm, change the categorization task, and to be able to make direct observations of attention to partner objects during the experiment.…”

“…The present work, as well as earlier related work (e.g. Corps et al, 2018;Hoedemaker et al, 2017;Hoedemaker & Meyer, 2019;Kuhlen & Rahman, 2017;Meyer et al, 2018) departed from a naturalistic paradigm to use a classic experimental psycholinguistic design (simple, normed items presented in randomized blocks that are in turn presented in a counterbalanced order)-in essence, treating language as a simple form of action. This strand of work illustrates the role for psycholinguistic laboratory studies for understanding conversation, and we hope that our work inspires future studies in this domain.…”

Joint language production: an electrophysiological investigation of simulated lexical access on behalf of task partner

“…However, there is a growing number of studies employing joint picture naming tasks that also report only limited, or no, representation of the partner's naming response (Brehm et al, 2019;Gambi, Van de Cavey, & Pickering, 2015;Hoedemaker & Meyer, 2019). These studies come to the conclusion that speakers may represent their partner's naming response, but not necessarily to the degree that they seek lexical access for the pictures the partner names.…”