Hadley Lauren V, Culling John F
Hearing Sciences - Scottish Section, School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2022 Dec 20;13:1061582. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1061582. eCollection 2022.
In conversation, people are able to listen to an utterance and respond within only a few hundred milliseconds. It takes substantially longer to prepare even a simple utterance, suggesting that interlocutors may make use of predictions about when the talker is about to end. But it is not only the upcoming talker that needs to anticipate the prior talker ending-listeners that are simply following the conversation could also benefit from predicting the turn end in order to shift attention appropriately with the turn switch. In this paper, we examined whether people predict upcoming turn ends when watching conversational turns switch between others by analysing natural conversations. These conversations were between triads of older adults in different levels and types of noise. The analysis focused on the observer during turn switches between the other two parties using head orientation (i.e. saccades from one talker to the next) to identify when their focus moved from one talker to the next. For non-overlapping utterances, observers started to turn to the upcoming talker before the prior talker had finished speaking in 17% of turn switches (going up to 26% when accounting for motor-planning time). For overlapping utterances, observers started to turn towards the interrupter before they interrupted in 18% of turn switches (going up to 33% when accounting for motor-planning time). The timing of head turns was more precise at lower than higher noise levels, and was not affected by noise type. These findings demonstrate that listeners in natural group conversation situations often exhibit head movements that anticipate the end of one conversational turn and the beginning of another. Furthermore, this work demonstrates the value of analysing head movement as a cue to social attention, which could be relevant for advancing communication technology such as hearing devices.
在对话中，人们能够在仅几百毫秒内听完一句话并做出回应。即使准备一句简单的话也需要长得多的时间，这表明对话者可能会利用对说话者何时即将结束的预测。但不仅即将说话的人需要预测前一个说话者的结束——仅仅是在跟随对话的听众也可以从预测话轮结束中受益，以便随着话轮转换适当地转移注意力。在本文中，我们通过分析自然对话来研究人们在观看他人之间的对话转换时是否会预测即将到来的话轮结束。这些对话是在不同噪音水平和类型下的老年三人组之间进行的。分析聚焦于观察者在另外两人之间的话轮转换过程中，利用头部朝向（即从一个说话者到下一个说话者的扫视）来确定他们的注意力何时从一个说话者转移到下一个说话者。对于不重叠的话语，在17%的话轮转换中，观察者在前一个说话者说完之前就开始转向即将说话的人（考虑到运动规划时间时，这一比例上升到26%）。对于重叠的话语，在18%的话轮转换中，观察者在打断者打断之前就开始转向他（考虑到运动规划时间时，这一比例上升到33%）。在较低噪音水平下，头部转动的时间比在较高噪音水平下更精确，并且不受噪音类型的影响。这些发现表明，在自然的群体对话情境中，听众经常会表现出头部动作，这些动作能预测一个对话话轮的结束和另一个话轮的开始。此外，这项研究证明了将头部动作分析作为社会注意力线索的价值，这可能与推进诸如听力设备等通信技术相关。
