Research Symposium

BIO

Egor is currently a 1st year honors student at FSU. He is majoring in psychology and undecided on his minor. However, he is interested in education and child development. He is currently in the UROP program and has been named to the FSU President's List. In the future, Egor plans on pursuing graduate education to become a child therapist.

The Silence of the Interim: Planning the Responses to your Questions

Abstract

Interlocutors often prepare their next conversational turn while their partner is still speaking. However, it is unclear what is being prepared. The responder could be preparing the form of their response early, where the form and content of a response is planned as early as possible during the question. On the other hand, the speaker can use late form production, where the content is planned during their partner’s question, but the form is planned towards the end of the question, closer to when the response is needed. But which production method is primarily used?
To research this, we conducted a study by using 49 trivia questions and asking them to undergraduate students at FSU. The questions were manipulated to have two parts, one that was critical to the answer and one that was not. The questions also either had a short answer or a long answer. When a participant came in, a lab researcher would ask the questions face to face and record the whole process. With the recorded audio, we measured the response time in audio analyzing software for the different types of questions and recorded the data. The data supports the idea of early form production, as the response time for critical information first questions were much lower than critical information second questions. Furthermore, the answer length showed positive correlation to response time in critical information second questions. These results show that for in-person questions, interlocutors use an early form strategy when producing responses.

Keywords: Language production, response latency, trivia questions