Ort: ZOOM
Zeit: 18:00 – 19:30 Uhr

Outi Tuomainen (Developmental Language Disorders, Universität Potsdam)

Speakers in Interaction: Effortful Speaking and Listening in Background Noise across the Lifespan

A great majority of previous work on how we produce and understand speech has focused on laboratory experiments where participants are asked to read or listen to carefully controlled lists of words and sentences. Our everyday speech interactions are rarely like this: we normally converse with other people, while doing something else at the same time, and often in challenging listening conditions (e.g., in background noise). In these real-life scenarios, speakers typically aim to convey the message to the listener in the most economical way possible, and to do this they need to find an appropriate balance between articulatory effort they invest and communicative success (how much was understood by the listener). For example, speakers continuously assess the level of understanding of their interlocutor via the appropriateness of their responses (e.g., the frequency of requests for clarification, pauses, and hesitations). If there is a breakdown in communication, the speaker may speak more clearly to increase the intelligibility of their speech. If communication is progressing well, speakers might start to reduce the effort they are making, and switch to a more casual speaking style. Listeners, in turn, need to modulate their listening effort to optimize the communicative success (e.g., invest more effort in challenging conditions). Therefore, we can say that everyday interactive speech is highly dynamic consisting of ongoing fluctuations between utterances understood/misunderstood and interlocutors’ adaptations to these fluctuations. In this talk, I will present some results from our past studies where we investigated how speakers clarify their speech and how listeners modulate their listening effort in order to compensate for the impact of background noise in everyday settings. I will discuss our findings in the context of communication effort framework proposed by Beechey, Buchholz & Keidser (2020).