This study provides a framework for measuring conversational dynamics between conversational partners (interlocutors). Conversations from 20 pairs of young, normal-hearing, native-Danish talkers were recorded when speaking in both quiet and noise (70 dBA sound pressure level [SPL]) and in Danish and English. Previous studies investigating the intervals from when one talker stops talking to when the next one starts, termed floor-transfer offsets (FTOs), suggest that typical turn-taking requires interlocutors to predict when the current talker will finish their turn. We hypothesized that adding noise and/or speaking in a second language (L2) would increase the communication difficulty and result in longer and more variable FTOs. The median and interquartile range of FTOs increased slightly in noise, and in L2, there was a small increase in interquartile range but a small decrease in the median of FTO durations. It took the participants longer to complete the task in both L2 and noise, indicating increased communication difficulty. The average duration of interpausal units, that is, units of connected speech surrounded by silences of 180 ms or more, increased by 18% in noise and 8% in L2. These findings suggest that talkers held their turn for longer, allowing more time for speech understanding and planning. In L2, participants spoke slower, and in both L2 and noise, they took fewer turns. These changes in behavior may have offset some of the increased difficulty when communicating in noise or L2. We speculate that talkers prioritize the maintenance of turn-taking timing over other speech measures.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165211024482 | DOI Listing |
Neurosci Biobehav Rev
January 2025
Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA; Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany. Electronic address:
Understanding how the brain distinguishes emotional from neutral scenes is crucial for advancing brain-computer interfaces, enabling real-time emotion detection for faster, more effective responses, and improving treatments for emotional disorders like depression and anxiety. However, inconsistent research findings have arisen from differences in study settings, such as variations in the time windows, brain regions, and emotion categories examined across studies. This review sought to compile the existing literature on the timing at which the adult brain differentiates basic affective from neutral scenes in less than one second, as previous studies have consistently shown that the brain can begin recognizing emotions within just a few milliseconds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSecond-language speakers are more likely to strategically reuse the words of their conversation partners (Zhang & Nicol, 2022). This study investigates if this is also the case for lower-proficiency bilinguals from a bilingual community, who use language more implicitly, and if there is more alignment with lower than with higher proficiency, provided the words to be aligned to are all highly familiar. In two experiments, Spanish-English bilinguals took turns with a confederate to name and match pictures in Spanish.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLang Speech
January 2025
Department of Educational Psychology, Leadership, & Counseling, Texas Tech University, USA.
Adapting one's speaking style is particularly crucial as children start interacting with diverse conversational partners in various communication contexts. The study investigated the capacity of preschool children aged 3-5 years ( = 28) to modify their speaking styles in response to background noise, referred to as noise-adapted speech, and when talking to an interlocutor who pretended to have hearing loss, referred to as clear speech. We examined how two modified speaking styles differed across the age range.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Res Methods
January 2025
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA.
Perception of emotion conveyed through language is influenced by embodied experiences obtained from social interactions, which may vary across different cultures. To explore cross-cultural differences in the perception of emotion between Chinese and English speakers, this study collected norms of valence and arousal from 322 native Mandarin speakers for 4923 Chinese words translated from Warriner et al., (Behavior Research Methods, 45, 1191-1207, 2013).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
January 2025
Instituto Universitario de Neurociencia (IUNE), Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Spain.
This study investigated how exposure to Caucasian and Chinese faces influences native Mandarin-Chinese speakers' learning of emotional meanings for English L2 words. Participants were presented with English pseudowords repeatedly paired with either Caucasian faces or Chinese faces showing emotions of disgust, sadness, or neutrality as a control baseline. Participants' learning was evaluated through both within-modality (i.
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