Self-, other-, and joint monitoring using forward models

In the psychology of language, most accounts of self-monitoring assume that it is based on comprehension. Here we outline and develop the alternative account proposed by Pickering and Garrod (2013), in which speakers construct forward models of their upcoming utterances and compare them with the utterance as they produce them. We propose that speakers compute inverse models derived from the discrepancy (error) between the utterance and the predicted utterance and use that to modify their production command or (occasionally) begin anew. We then propose that comprehenders monitor other people’s speech by simulating their utterances using covert imitation and forward models, and then comparing those forward models with what they hear. They use the discrepancy to compute inverse models and modify their representation of the speaker’s production command, or realize that their representation is incorrect and may develop a new production command. We then discuss monitoring in dialogue, paying attention to sequential contributions, concurrent feedback, and the relationship between monitoring and alignment

A theory of prediction in simultaneous interpreting

People make comprehension easier by predicting upcoming language. We might therefore expect prediction to occur during the extremely difficult task of simultaneous interpreting. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical foundations of this premise. It reviews accounts of prediction during comprehension in both monolinguals and bilinguals, and discusses these theories in light of experimental data (e.g., using the visual-world paradigm). It considers how these accounts may be applied to the unique and ecologically valid context of simultaneous interpreting, when two languages are used concurrently, one overtly engaging the comprehension system, and the other overtly engaging the production system. It then posits a role for the production system in prediction during comprehension and develops a theoretical framework for prediction-by-production in simultaneous interpreting that has implications for our understanding of prediction during language comprehension.</p

Compensating for processing difficulty in discourse:Effect of parallelism in contrastive relations

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., and, but) and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments—namely, parallelism. While but is mainly used to contrast two expressions, and occurs in many different relations and has been shown to come with a processing cost. We report three self-paced reading experiments in which we manipulate whether the connected segments share a common verb phrase. Such parallel constructions frequently occur in contrastive relations, although they are typically treated as additive in comprehension research. We expect that parallelism will compensate for the cognitive complexity of contrast and for the ambiguity of and by further signaling the coherence relation. Our results indicate that parallelism speeds up processing and provides further evidence for priming in comprehension. However, parallelism interacted with connective ambiguity in an overt disambiguation task (Experiment 3) but not in a more natural reading task (Experiment 2). We argue that the processing of contrast remains shallow unless disambiguation is explicitly required

A Cognitive Architecture for the Coordination of Utterances

Dialog partners coordinate with each other to reach a common goal. The analogy with other joint activities has sparked interesting observations (e.g., about the norms governing turn-taking) and has informed studies of linguistic alignment in dialog. However, the parallels between language and action have not been fully explored, especially with regard to the mechanisms that support moment-by-moment coordination during language use in conversation. We review the literature on joint actions to show (i) what sorts of mechanisms allow coordination and (ii) which types of experimental paradigms can be informative of the nature of such mechanisms. Regarding (i), there is converging evidence that the actions of others can be represented in the same format as one’s own actions. Furthermore, the predicted actions of others are taken into account in the planning of one’s own actions. Similarly, we propose that interlocutors are able to coordinate their acts of production because they can represent their partner’s utterances. They can then use these representations to build predictions, which they take into account when planning self-generated utterances. Regarding (ii), we propose a new methodology to study interactive language. Psycholinguistic tasks that have traditionally been used to study individual language production are distributed across two participants, who either produce two utterances simultaneously or complete each other’s utterances

Predicting turn-ends in discourse context

Research suggests that during conversation, interlocutors coordinate their utterances by predicting the speaker’s forthcoming utterance and its end. In two experiments, we used a button-pressing task, in which participants pressed a button when they thought a speaker reached the end of their utterance, to investigate what role the wider discourse plays in turn-end prediction. Participants heard two-utterance sequences, in which the content of the second utterance was or was not constrained by the content of the first. In both experiments, participants responded earlier, but not more precisely, when the first utterance was constraining rather than unconstraining. Response times and precision were unaffected by whether they listened to dialogues or monologues (Experiment 1) and by whether they read the first utterance out loud or silently (Experiment 2), providing no indication that activation of production mechanisms facilitates prediction. We suggest that content predictions aid comprehension but not turn-end prediction