Psychology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Apr;31(2):839-848. doi: 10.3758/s13423-023-02382-3. Epub 2023 Sep 22.
To answer a question, speakers must determine their response and formulate it in words. But do they decide on a response before formulation, or do they formulate different potential answers before selecting one? We addressed this issue in a verbal question-answering experiment. Participants answered questions more quickly when they had one potential answer (e.g., Which tourist attraction in Paris is very tall?) than when they had multiple potential answers (e.g., What is the name of a Shakespeare play?). Participants also answered more quickly when the set of potential answers were on average short rather than long, regardless of whether there was only one or multiple potential answers. Thus, participants were not affected by the linguistic complexity of unselected but plausible answers. These findings suggest that participants select a single answer before formulation.
为了回答一个问题，说话者必须确定他们的回答并将其用言语表达出来。但是，他们是在形成答案之前就决定了回答，还是在选择一个回答之前先形成了不同的潜在回答？我们在一个口头问答实验中解决了这个问题。与有多个潜在答案（例如，巴黎的哪个旅游景点非常高？）相比，当参与者只有一个潜在答案（例如，莎士比亚的哪部戏剧？）时，他们回答问题的速度更快。无论潜在答案是一个还是多个，当潜在答案的平均长度较短而不是较长时，参与者的回答速度也会更快。因此，参与者不会受到未被选中但合理的答案的语言复杂性的影响。这些发现表明，参与者在形成答案之前先选择一个单一的答案。
