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Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair

Paper · 2021 · Julia Beret Mertens and J. P. de Ruiter

Summary

Some conversational turns start later than others, and two explanations compete. Psycholinguists treat a pause as an accidental cost of extra processing. Conversation analysts treat it as an intentional cue that a dispreferred move is coming. The two accounts usually predict the same delays, so the authors chose a turn type that is both effortful and dispreferred: other-initiated repair (OIR). An OIR is when a listener signals trouble hearing or understanding, for example "Sorry?". They took 456 OIRs from the CABNC, a conversation-analytic version of the spoken British National Corpus. For each one they measured the Floor Transfer Offset (FTO), the gap or overlap after the problematic turn, and related it to cognitive and social predictors. Repair came sooner when the discourse context was stronger, when the trouble-source turn was longer, when the problem could be blamed on overlapping talk, and when the problem was smaller. Word frequency had no influence. The authors conclude that processing sets a minimum response time and social accountability can lengthen it further. Response timing therefore carries both kinds of information.

Key points

  • Data: 456 OIRs drawn from CABNC, which is built on the BNC and contains roughly 4.2 million words across 1,436 British conversations captured during the late 20th century.
  • Reference timings from the literature: most turns begin within about 250 ms, naming a simple object takes about 600 ms, and OIRs have a median delay of about 721 ms versus about 340 ms for answers to yes/no questions (Kendrick 2015b).
  • Any overlapping talk during the trouble source shortened OIR FTO by a similar amount, regardless of how much overlap there was. The authors read this as a social effect: the noise takes the blame, not the listener.
  • Longer trouble-source turns led to faster OIRs, which is the opposite of the corpus-wide finding of Roberts et al. (2015). The suggested reason is that the listener gets more time to plan the repair.
  • Strong Bayesian evidence for no word-frequency effect (BF01 = 14.76). The open-class vs specific OIR category did matter, but whether its cause is cognitive or social remains unresolved, and the progressivity hypothesis for open-class OIRs was not supported.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Instead of modelling every utterance in a corpus, the authors analyse one narrowly defined act type so that confounds from other act types cannot blur the effect; this changed the sign of a known result.
  • I2. Checking whether an effect is graded or all-or-nothing helps identify its mechanism: overlap acted as a binary switch, which pointed to a social cause rather than a processing load.
  • I3. Dispreferred responses are projected by surface cues before their content arrives, such as a long gap, a stretched turn-initial "well", or an appreciation preface.
  • I4. Repair can be open-class ("What?") or specific (targeting one element), and smaller, attributable problems are cheaper socially.
  • I5. A Bayes factor is reported to give positive support for a null result, not just a failure to reject it.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): evaluate parser and frame accuracy separately per construction or speech-act slice, so gains in one slice do not hide regressions in another.
  • I2 (learn): when testing a self-induced repair rule, vary the triggering feature's strength and see whether the effect scales, as a diagnostic alongside negative controls.
  • I3 (frames): let prag treat these cues as evidence that an upcoming act is a refusal or rejection, and use them to explain the predicted speech act.
  • I4 (answer): when a reader cannot resolve a question, it should ask a targeted clarification naming the problematic span rather than a generic failure message.
  • I5 (learn): when a candidate feature (e.g., word frequency in a tagger or parser) shows no gain, record quantified evidence of no effect so it is not re-tested endlessly.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Tufts UniversityMedford · United States5 works · 380 citations

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArtificial Intelligence · 8,889 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Dialogue systems · 401 works

Cite

Cite as Julia Beret Mertens and J. P. de Ruiter. 2021. Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair. Dialogue & Discourse.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5210/dad.2021.102

@inproceedings{mertens2021cognitive,
  title = {{Cognitive and social delays in the initiation of conversational repair}},
  author = {Julia Beret Mertens and J. P. {de Ruiter}},
  booktitle = {Dialogue \& Discourse},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.5210/dad.2021.102},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.102}
}

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