Science4Data Article Insights

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190306100641.htm

People track when talkers say 'uh' to predict what comes next

2019-03-19 00:00:00, , ScienceDaily

Content Categorization
/Health/Health Conditions/Neurological Conditions

Word Count:
617

Words/Sentence:
27

Reading Time:
4.11 min

Reading Quality:
Adept

Readability:
13th to 15th

Media Sentiment
Proprietary sentiment analysis on both the headline and body text of the article. Sentiment scores range from -1 (very negative sentiment) to 1 (very positive sentiment).
RCS Analysis
Relative scoring for Risk, Crisis, and Security language within the article.
Risk Score
Scoring based on the composite risk, security and crisis language within an article compared to a baseline of historic analysis across thousands of diverse articles.
PESTEL Scope
Analysis of article orientation across the PESTEL macro-environmental analysis framework. Learn more about PESTEL.
Entity Word Cloud
Key people, places, organizations and events referenced in the article, weighted by frequency and colored based on contextual sentiment.
Auto Summary
Condensing key features of the article based on salience analysis. Helpful for “gisting” the article in a time crunch.

"We take this as evidence that listeners actively keep track of when and where talkers say 'uh' in spoken communication, adjusting what they predict will come next for different talkers," concludes Bosker.

Speakers with a foreign accent

Would listeners also adjust their expectations with a non-native speaker?

They tested whether listeners would actively track the occurrence of 'uh', even when it appeared in unexpected places.

Click on uh… the igloo

The researchers used eye-tracking, which measures people's looks towards objects on a screen.

However, one group heard a 'typical' talker say 'uh' before 'hard-to-name' low-frequency words ("Click on uh… the igloo"), while the other group heard an 'atypical' talker saying 'uh' before 'easy-to-name' high-frequency words ("Click on uh… the hand").

Would people in this second group track the unexpected occurrences of 'uh' and learn to look at the 'easy-to-name' object?

As expected, participants listening to the 'typical' talker already looked at the igloo upon hearing the disfluency ('uh'…; that is well before hearing 'igloo').

People actively track when particular talkers say 'uh' on a moment by moment basis, adjusting their predictions about what will come next," explains Bosker.

Keywords
Racial Issues, Perception, Educational Psychology, Language Acquisition, Hearing Impairment, Child Development, Infant and Preschool Learning, Literacy

Interested in Learning More?

Article Analysis is at the foundation of powerful media monitoring and insights. Learn what you can build with powerful curated search engines, real-time listening and trend analysis on the topics, markets and companies critical to your organization.