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.