Corps, R.E. orcid.org/0000-0001-6027-8109 and Pickering, M.J. (2024) The role of answer content and length when preparing answers to questions. Scientific Reports, 14 (1). 17110. ISSN 2045-2322
Abstract
Research suggests that interlocutors manage the timing demands of conversation by preparing what they want to say early. In three experiments, we used a verbal question-answering task to investigate what aspects of their response speakers prepare early. In all three experiments, participants answered more quickly when the critical content (here, barks) necessary for answer preparation occurred early (e.g., Which animal barks and is also a common household pet?) rather than late (e.g., Which animal is a common household pet and also barks?). In the individual experiments, we found no convincing evidence that participants were slower to produce longer answers, consisting of multiple words, than shorter answers, consisting of a single word. There was also no interaction between these two factors. A combined analysis of the first two experiments confirmed this lack of interaction, and demonstrated that participants were faster to answer questions when the critical content was available early rather than late and when the answer was short rather than long. These findings provide tentative evidence for an account in which interlocutors prepare the content of their answer as soon as they can, but sometimes do not prepare its length (and thus form) until they are ready to speak.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. Tis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Turn-taking; Dialogue; Question-answering; Speech planning |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 06 Aug 2024 07:46 |
Last Modified: | 06 Aug 2024 07:46 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41598-024-68253-6 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:215463 |