Learning to speak in time: Perception and production processes involved in conversational turn-taking

每一次谈话都是由轮流发言组成的。许多人惊讶地发现，演讲者轮流发言的时间很短（平均间隔约200毫秒），几乎没有任何重叠。世界各地的语言对话都是如此。由于没有单一的线索表明某人何时会结束演讲，听众必须实时跟踪演讲，并注意各种线索，以确定演讲者何时结束演讲。但是对话中的参与者依赖什么信息呢？这个项目通过研究说话人轮流发言的速度的自然变化，以及测量旁观者在观看两个人谈话的视频时的眼球运动，来调查儿童和成人如何“准时”轮流发言。这个项目将调查参与者预测转弯结束的能力在多大程度上依赖于日常讲话中的单词、语调和节奏（韵律）。单词给出了内容的信息，以及即将到来的演讲的结构。韵律是一个短语结构的连续线索，在很多情况下也与单词有关。由于幼儿善于区分某些韵律模式，但对单词或语法了解不多，我们假设他们对线索的使用与成人不同。这个项目将研究自然对话中的轮流，以确定这种对话技能的发展路径。对话是分析与其他社会存在互动的门户。对孩子来说，对话是学习语言和世界的一种方式。成年人的一些琐碎技能，比如知道什么时候进来，如何问相关的问题，孩子们需要几年的时间来发展。了解孩子们是如何发展这些技能的，也应该有助于了解他们是如何获得周围的信息的。

Every conversation is made up of turns at speaking. Many people are surprised to learn that speakers take turns with very little time between speakers (gaps average ~200ms) with hardly any overlaps. This is true of conversation in languages around the world. Since there's no single clue to indicate when someone will finish speaking, listeners must track speech in real time and attend to a variety of cues to when a speaker will end. But what information do participants in a conversation rely on? This project investigates how children and adults take turns 'on time' by studying natural variation in how quickly speakers take their turns, and by measuring onlookers' eye movements as they watch videos of two people talking. This project will investigate how much participants' ability to anticipate the end of a turn relies on words vs. intonation and rhythm (prosody) in everyday speech. Words give information about content, and also about the structure of upcoming speech. Prosody is a continuous cue to how a phrase is structured, and also relates to the words in many cases. Because young children are good at differentiating between some prosodic patterns, but don't yet know much about words or syntax, we hypothesize that their use of cues will differ from adults'. This project will study turn-taking in natural conversations in order to identify the developmental path for this conversational skill. Conversation is the gateway for analyzing interaction with other social beings. For children, conversation is a way to learn about language and the world. Trivial skills for adults, such as knowing when to come in and how to ask relevant questions, take children years to develop. Understanding how children develop these skills should also shed light on how they gain access to the information all around them.