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

每一次对话都是由说话的轮换组成的。许多人惊讶地发现，演讲者之间轮流发言的时间很少(平均间隔约200ms)，几乎没有任何重叠。这在世界各地的语言对话中都是如此。由于没有单一的线索来指示某人何时结束发言，听众必须实时跟踪讲话，并注意到演讲者何时结束的各种线索。但是，对话中的参与者依赖哪些信息呢？这个项目通过研究说话者轮流说话的速度的自然变化，以及通过测量旁观者在观看两个人交谈的视频时的眼球运动，来调查儿童和成年人是如何“准时”轮流的。这个项目将调查参与者预测话轮结束的能力在多大程度上依赖于日常言语中的词语与语调和节奏(韵律)。文字提供了有关内容的信息，也提供了关于即将发表的演讲的结构的信息。韵律是对短语结构的连续提示，在许多情况下也与单词有关。由于幼儿擅长区分一些韵律模式，但对单词或句法了解不多，我们假设他们对线索的使用将与成年人不同。这个项目将研究自然对话中的话轮转换，以确定这一会话技能的发展路径。会话是分析与其他社会存在的互动的门户。对于孩子们来说，对话是学习语言和世界的一种方式。对于成年人来说，一些琐碎的技能，比如知道什么时候进来，以及如何问相关的问题，需要孩子们花几年时间才能培养出来。了解儿童是如何发展这些技能的，也应该有助于了解他们如何获得周围的信息。

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.