The dynamics of conversational turn-taking: How does speech timing interact with neural entrainment?

成年健谈者通常会避免长时间的停顿，也会避免轮流之间的意外重叠，但目前尚不清楚这种流利的轮流是如何协调的。该项目研究了在英语和汉语这两种具有不同时间模式的语言中，语音时间如何影响会话的流畅性。通过语料库分析以及行为和神经科学实验，该项目从经验上验证了一个长期存在的假设，即轮转流畅性是由音节流动的神经活动所促进的。更一般地说，它将有助于通过寻找感知和行为的普遍原则来跨语言理解轮流的语音时间。

Adult conversationalists usually avoid both extended pauses and unintended overlaps between their turns, but it remains unclear how such fluent turn-taking is coordinated. The project investigates how speech timing influences fluency in conversational turn-taking in two languages with distinct timing patterns, English and Chinese. Through corpus analysis alongside behavioural and neuroscientific experiments, the project empirically tests the longstanding hypothesis that turn-taking fluency is promoted by entrainment of neural activity with the flow of syllables. More generally, it will contribute to a cross-linguistic understanding ofspeech timing in turn-taking, informed by the search for universal principles of perception and behaviour.