Integrative mechanisms in human-human and human-robot communication across the adult lifespan.

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Spoken language is produced and understood at a striking pace. For example, words in fluent speech are often generated at a rate of 2 or 3 per second, and many core linguistic distinctions (such as the acoustic properties that differentiate individual speech sounds) hinge on timing differences at the level of tens of milliseconds. How does the human mind cope with the rapid and dynamic nature of spoken language? The broad goals of our research program are to understand how the speed and efficiency of language processing result from the particular ways that humans unconsciously combine visual and auditory signals with mentally-stored knowledge. One theme in our past research explored how real-time comprehension draws on a listener's implicit expectations about the form and content of what will be said next. Another theme explored the extent to which listeners rapidly draw on fine-grained acoustic details in the auditory signal. Further, by making comparisons between younger and older (65+) adults, we have been working to understand how communicative abilities change over the course of the adult lifespan.  Going forward, one objective of our current research is to understand how the speed and efficiency of language processing arises from the information beyond the speech signal itself. Communicative requirements vary from context to context, and this may entail conscious or unconscious changes in the way that listeners attend to and draw on potentially helpful information sources. A second objective is to develop insights into the way that language processing abilities change as we age.  Given the complexity of the underlying mechanisms, this goal requires a clear programmatic approach involving converging evidence from many different angles. Finally, given recent advances in technology, one increasingly important topic involves humans' interactions with artificial agents equipped with spoken language interfaces. To date, comparatively little is known about how humans adapt or adjust their speaking and listening strategies in these scenarios. To address this issue, we have begun to use human-robot communication to systematically identify which processes occur automatically as people engage in communicative interaction, and which are under more conscious control. This work is conducted with a programmable social robot whose communicative behaviours (e.g., speech rate, intonation, accent, pauses, eye gaze patterns) can be controlled with fine-grained precision. In all of these studies, we employ sensitive and adaptable eye-tracking techniques to reveal the character of comprehension processes as language is encountered in real time at the millisecond level.  The outcomes of this research will provide important insights into the cognitive architecture that supports core language processing abilities as we communicate with other humans or with artificial agents.