PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Frequency distributions are known to widely affect psycholinguistic processes. The effects of word frequency in turns-at-talk, the nucleus of social action in conversation, have, by contrast, been largely neglected. This study probes into this gap by applying corpus-linguistic methods on the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). The latter includes continuous pupil size measures of participants of the recorded conversations, allowing for a systematic investigation of patterns in the contained speech and language on the one hand and their relation to concurrent processing costs they may incur in speakers and recipients on the other hand. We test a first hypothesis in this vein, analyzing whether word frequency distributions within turns-at-talk are correlated with interlocutors\' processing effort during the production and reception of these turns. Turns are found to generally show a regular distribution pattern of word frequency, with highly frequent words in turn-initial positions, mid-range frequency words in turn-medial positions, and low-frequency words in turn-final positions. Speakers\' pupil size is found to tend to increase during the course of a turn at talk, reaching a climax toward the turn end. Notably, the observed decrease in word frequency within turns is inversely correlated with the observed increase in pupil size in speakers, but not in recipients, with steeper decreases in word frequency going along with steeper increases in pupil size in speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech processing, turn structure, and information packaging. Crucially, we propose that the intensification of processing effort in speakers during a turn at talk is owed to an informational climax, which entails a progression from high-frequency, low-information words through intermediate levels to low-frequency, high-information words. At least in English conversation, interlocutors seem to make use of this pattern as one way to achieve efficiency in conversational interaction, creating a regularly recurring distribution of processing load across speaking turns, which aids smooth turn transitions, content prediction, and effective information transfer.
摘要：
众所周知，频率分布会广泛影响心理语言过程。词频在说话时的影响，对话中社会行动的核心，有,相比之下,在很大程度上被忽视了。本研究通过在英国国家语料库（BNC）和弗莱堡多模态交互语料库（FreMIC）的会话部分应用语料库语言方法来探讨这一差距。后者包括记录对话的参与者的连续瞳孔大小测量，一方面，允许系统地调查所含语音和语言的模式，以及它们与说话者和接受者可能产生的并发处理成本的关系。我们在这方面检验了第一个假设，分析说话转弯中的词频分布是否与这些转弯的产生和接收过程中的对话者的处理努力相关。发现转弯通常显示出词频的规则分布模式，在转弯初始位置使用非常频繁的单词，转向中间位置的中频单词，和在最终位置的低频单词。发现说话者的瞳孔大小在谈话过程中趋于增加，到达转弯终点的高潮。值得注意的是,观察到的单词频率在转弯内的减少与观察到的说话者瞳孔大小的增加成反比，但不是在收件人中，随着单词频率的急剧降低，扬声器的瞳孔大小也会急剧增加。我们讨论了这些发现对语音处理理论的影响，车削结构,信息包装。至关重要的是，我们认为，在演讲中发言者的处理努力的加强是由于信息高潮，这意味着从高频发展，低信息词通过中级到低频，高信息词。至少在英语会话中,对话者似乎利用这种模式作为实现对话互动效率的一种方式，在说话轮次中创建定期重复的处理负荷分布，这有助于平滑的转弯过渡，内容预测，和有效的信息传递。
