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The Effects of Addressee Attention on Prosodic Prominence
Journal: Language and Cognitive Processes
Manuscript ID: Draft
Manuscript Type: Prosody in Context
Date Submitted by the Author:
n/a
Complete List of Authors: Rosa, Elise; UNC Chapel Hill, Psychology Finch, Kayla; UNC Chapel Hill, Psychology Bergeson, Molly; UNC Chapel Hill, Psychology Arnold, Jennifer; UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of Psychology
Keywords: Prosody, Attention, audience design
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Title: The Effects of Addressee Attention on Prosodic Prominence
Names of Authors: Elise C. Rosa, Kayla H. Finch, Molly Bergeson, Jennifer E. Arnold
Address of authors: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Short Title: The Effects of Addressee Attention
Correspondence should be addressed to Elise Rosa, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Department of Psychology, Davie Hall CB #3270, Chapel Hill, NC, 27516, USA Email:
Fax: 919-962-2537
Email: [email protected]
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ABSTRACT
How do speakers accommodate distracted listeners? Specifically, how does prosody change
when speakers know that their addressees are multitasking? Speakers might use more
acoustically prominent words for distracted addressees, to ensure that important information is
communicated. Alternatively, speakers might disengage from the task and use less prominent
pronunciations with distracted addressees. A further question is whether prosodic prominence
changes globally or if there are effects specific to the most relevant information. We studied
these effects in two instruction-giving experiments. Speakers instructed listeners to move objects
to locations on a board. In the distraction condition, addressees were also completing a
demanding secondary computer task; in the attentive condition they paid full attention. Results
demonstrated that speakers modify their speech for distracted listeners, and in an instruction-
giving task they specifically use more acoustically prominent (longer) pronunciations for
distracted listeners. This effect was localized to the most task-relevant information: the object to
be moved.
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This research was supported by: NSF grant BCS-0745627. We gratefully acknowledge the
assistance of Giulia Pancani.
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Speakers have numerous choices to make for every message they want to communicate.
They can be concise (Crackers please!) or verbose (Can you please hand me that box of
crackers?) They can specify objects with detail (That box of saltines next to you) or not (that).
They can enunciate words prominently or with a reduced pronunciation. Many of these choices
are related to the information being communicated. Already-known or predictable information is
generally expressed with fewer words, less detail, and reduced pronunciation, whereas new or
important information is referred to with more words, more detail, and acoustically prominent
forms (Arnold, 1998, 2008, 2010; Brown, 1983; Chafe, 1976; Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski,
1993; Halliday, 1967; Sityaev, 2000). A much-debated issue is whether these choices are made
as a result of the speaker’s knowledge about their addressee’s knowledge or attention – a process
known as audience design (Arnold, Kahn, & Pancani, in press; Horton & Keysar, 1996; Galati
& Brennan, 2010).
In this paper we ask whether people speak differently when their addressee is distracted,
as one type of audience design. For example, if your request for crackers is directed at someone
engaged in a different task, like driving a car, how will your word choice and pronunciation be
affected? There are a lot of dimensions on which you might change your prosody- you might
speak the whole sentence more slowly, or loudly, or you might speak only particular words more
slowly. We focus here on how speakers modify the acoustic prominence of their words,
specifically word duration, but also examine how it co-occurs with other types of linguistic form
variation. Duration is especially interesting because it may vary as a function of the speaker’s
desire to make certain words prominent (Breen, Fedorenko, Wagner, & Gibson, 2010; Ladd,
1996), but also can provide a cue about the speaker’s fluency (Bell, Jurafsky, Fosler-Lussier,
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Girand, Gregory et al., 2003), which in turn can affect comprehension (e.g., Arnold, Tanenhaus,
Altmann & Fagnano, 2004; Arnold, Hudson Kam & Tanenhaus, 2007).
It is well established that speakers use language differently for different addressees (e.g.,
Clark, 1996; Clark & Krych, 2004; Galati & Brennan, 2010), and there is good evidence that
audience design impacts lexical choices (Brown-Schmidt & Tanenhaus, 2006; Brennan & Clark,
1996; Gorman et al., 2011; Heller, Gorman & Tanenhaus, in press; Horton & Keysar 1996).
Speakers refer to objects in conversation using partner-specific terms they’ve developed over the
course of conversation. They also keep track of the physical presence of objects they’re referring
to for themselves and their conversational partners.
However, an ongoing debate concerns the effect of audience design on acoustic
prominence. Some theories suggest that audience design is the primary determinant of the
speaker’s choice to acoustically emphasize some words (Chafe, 1987, Lindblom, 1990). This
account is consistent with the idea that new and unpredictable information tends to be accented
(e.g., Venditti & Hirschberg, 2003), since this information should be less accessible to listeners,
and thus require more explicit input. However, a strong version of this account has found little
support in empirical studies where the speaker and addressee’s knowledge are examined
separately. For example, Bard and colleagues (Bard, Anderson, Aylett, Doherty-Sneddon &
Newlands, 2000; Bard & Aylett, 2005) found that intelligibility was unaffected by numerous
measures of the listener’s knowledge. They proposed the dual process hypothesis (Bard et al.,
2000), in which fast automatic processes allow for the speaker’s memory to affect articulation,
and slower processes incorporate information about the listener for purposes like choosing
pronominal forms. Similarly, Kahn & Arnold (2012, under review- b) found that speakers
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shortened nouns that they had recently heard, regardless of their addressee’s experience with the
word.
In contrast, Galati & Brennan (2010) found that words directed at knowledgeable
addressees were rated as less intelligible than those directed at naïve addressees, even though
they did not differ on duration. Arnold et al. (in press) found that speakers in their experiment
did modulate the duration of words in response to addressee behavior, but specifically on a word
associated with utterance planning -- the determiner the (Clark & Wasow, 1998). This suggested
that effects of audience design may be mediated by production-internal processes of utterance
planning.
Whether audience design affects acoustic variation or not, there is abundant evidence that
speakers use longer and more acoustically prominent pronunciations for information that is
harder to retrieve or plan and shorter pronunciations for easy-to-produce words and referents
(Arnold & Watson, 2012, under review; Balota & Chumbley, 1985; Lam & Watson, 2010; Kahn
& Arnold, 2012, under review-a; Bard et al., 2000; Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand & Jurafsky,
2009). For example, when speakers are disfluent, saying um, uh, or repeating words, it indicates
they are having speech production difficulty. Words surrounding such disfluent elements also
tend to be longer (Bell et al., 2003).
In sum, previous work suggests that speakers accommodate their listeners’ needs in many
ways, but effects of audience design on acoustic variation are variable. However, the majority of
work on this question has focused on whether speakers adjust their pronunciations in response to
their addressee’s knowledge. The current work instead examines the effects of the listener’s
attentional state. Do speakers modulate the acoustic properties of their speech in response to
visible evidence that their addressee is distracted?
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Distraction is a common characteristic of day-to-day life, yet relatively little is known
about how speakers adjust their linguistic form when speaking to distracted addressees. In a
narrative recall study, Pasupathi, Stallworth & Murdoch (1998) found that speakers with
attentive addressees produced more information than those with distracted addressees. Similarly,
Kuhlen & Brennan (2010) found that speakers told narrative jokes with more detail with
attentive rather than distracted addresses, although this effect was weakened when the speaker
expected the addressee to be distracted. Thus, these studies found that speakers provided less
information to distracted addressees.
By contrast, a study by Arnold et al. (in press) suggests that speakers provide more
information for less-attentive addressees. Speakers gave instructions to addressees to place
objects on a board of colored dots, e.g. The teapot goes on yellow. The addressee was either
especially attentive, anticipating the object when possible, or merely normally attentive.
Speakers both used more words and longer pronunciations of the word the with non-anticipating
addresses. Unlike the narrative tasks in which distracted addressees elicited less detail, this task
required the addressee to follow instructions, so increased verbal specificity may have had a
concrete advantage for completing the task. Similar results come from a narrative production
study by Rosa & Arnold (2011), except they found that speakers provided more explicit referring
expressions when they themselves were distracted.
The current study used an instruction-following task similar to Arnold et al. (in press) to
examine the effects of addressee attention at the other end of the spectrum, when addressees are
distracted with a secondary task. If speakers use acoustic prominence to ensure effective
communication, we would expect to see longer words with distracted addressees. If such an
effect is driven by the comprehension needs of the listener, we would expect increased
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prominence to be localized to the most central information for the task, that is, the word
describing the target object. Alternatively, if speakers engage more with attentive addressees,
they might decrease acoustic prominence for distracted addressees, as found in narrative recall
tasks for lexical detail (Kuhlen & Brennan, 2010; Pasupathi et al., 1998).
A second question was whether effects of addressee distraction would interact with
known informational predictors of acoustic prominence. One well-known determinant of word
duration is predictability: Predictable words tend to be acoustically reduced (Jurafsky, Bell,
Gregory & Raymond, 2001; Bell et al., 2009; Gahl & Garnsey, 2004), where predictability can
stem from the surrounding words, the prior sentence meaning, or syntactic structure. Likewise,
when the discourse context leads to an expectation of a specific referent, words referring to it
tend to be reduced (Arnold 1998, 2001; Lam & Watson, 2010; Watson, Arnold, & Tanenhaus,
2008). If speakers think that distracted addressees cannot follow predictability cues effectively,
they may resist the usual tendency to reduce predictable information, and thereby show greater
acoustic prominence specifically for predictable words. Alternatively, they may use a simpler
strategy of adjusting their speech for distracted addressees overall, regardless of predictability.
We therefore examined the effects of addressee distraction in two experiments. Both used
the same instruction-giving task. Each trial involved two objects, and speakers always produced
one instruction for each object. In Experiment 1 the target object was the second item in the pair,
meaning that after the first instruction was given, the object in the second instruction was fully
predictable. In Experiment 2, the same target objects were used as the first instruction, so they
were relatively less predictable. Word duration was the main variable of concern in this study,
but the effects of predictability and distraction on lexical choices were also examined.
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One of the advantages of this experimental paradigm is that it involved a concrete task,
which provided the speaker with motivation to accommodate the addressee. Another advantage
to this task is that it imposed little to no memory burden on the subject, in contrast to other
studies that used either maps or narratives that only the speaker had viewed (Bard & Aylett,
2005; Bard et al. 2000). As this added burden of “record-keeping” was reduced in our task,
speakers presumably had more resources with which to complete the task, and therefore might be
more capable of considering their listeners in planning their utterances. Additionally, partner-
specific findings or audience design effects are most likely to occur in an interactive dialog
setting (Brown-Schmidt, 2009)
EXPERIMENTS 1 AND 2
We tested how speakers would modify their speech in reaction to the listener’s state of
distraction, in two experiments. The methods and analyses were nearly identical across the two
experiments, so they are reported together.
Method
Participants. Twenty undergraduate students from the University of North Carolina
participated, ten in Experiment 1, and ten in Experiment 2. All participants were native speakers
of English, and normal or corrected-to-normal vision. Participants received course credit for their
participation.
Materials and Design. Target stimuli consisted of 48 physical objects whose names were
matched for number of phonemes, syllables, and frequency. The same target stimuli were used in
Experiments 1 and 2. Filler stimuli (i.e., those objects used for the other instruction) were all 1
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syllable, and were the same across experiments. Two lists were formed for each experiment, as
participants worked with one attentive addressee and 1 distracted addressee. The lists were
paired by length, phonemes, and frequency as closely as possible. Targets were presented to each
participant once, either as the second item in a pair (Experiment 1, predictable targets), or as the
first item in a pair (Experiment 2, unpredictable targets). Different study participants performed
the two experiments. Thus, there were 20 participants total with 48 trials each. The order in
which addressees (distracted, attention) were encountered was counterbalanced across
participants to provide a control of any carry-over effect between first and second blocks.
Equipment. Stimuli were presented on a computer monitor in a slide-show format, using
Powerpoint. The objects to be moved were stored in containers, and were put on the table in
pairs. Responses were recorded using a headset microphone.
Procedure. Participants worked with two confederates during each of the experiments.
During half of the trials the participant was paired with a distracted confederate, who was
performing a secondary computer task while completing the primary task. During the other half
of the trials the participants worked with a confederate who was not performing any secondary
task. The secondary task was a timed state-labeling game that required the confederate to be
continuously engaged, except when pausing to carry out the instructions. The order of distraction
was counter-balanced between participants.
The primary task was an instruction-giving task. Once the experiment began, participants
would see pictures of two objects appear on a computer screen behind the confederate. The
objects were on colored circles on the screen. The two objects to be moved were placed on the
table, and the participant instructed the confederate to move them to the appropriate colored
circles. The objects appeared on the computer screen one at a time. In Experiment 1 the target
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item was the second object to appear, making it entirely predictable. In Experiment 2 the target
item object was the first to appear on the screen, making it relatively unpredictable to the
confederate, who could not view the screen. Participants issued verbal instructions to
confederates to move the objects, for example, “Put the fox on the green circle. Now put the cork
on the red circle”. As soon as confederates moved the second object of the pair, the computer
screen was advanced to the next trial.
Analysis. We examined how the distraction manipulation affected the speakers’ choices
in both 1) number of words in the target expression, and 2) the acoustic prominence of their
pronunciations, as measured by the duration of four key regions: a) the latency to begin
speaking, as indexed by the time between the onset of the visual stimulus and the onset of the
first word in the response (excluding disfluencies like uh); b) the determiner the, when produced,
c) the target noun, e.g. fox; and d) the color word, e.g. red.
Duration and latency analyses were restricted to definite noun phrases ‘the koala’ or bare
noun ‘koala’ phrases. Disfluent trials were excluded. Out of the 960 trials (48 trials per 20
participants), 8.96% of the data in Experiment 1 and 9.58% of the data in Experiment 2 were
excluded from the acoustic analyses by these criteria. There were 437 tokens in the analysis for
Experiment 1, and 434 for Experiment 2. Latency analyses additionally excluded outliers that
were more than 2.5 standard deviations above the mean.
Data were analyzed with multilevel logistic regressions in SAS using the proc mixed
command. All models included a random intercept for both subject and either item (for the
number of words analysis) or target noun (for the duration analyses). Target noun was used
instead of item because subjects used a different label for the target object than the intended one
on 14% of the trials, and the noun heavily constrains duration. Similar results obtain if analyses
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are restricted to the trials where the intended word was used. We also included random slopes for
subject and item/noun by condition, where possible, following the procedure below.
The primary predictor in our model was the current condition (confederate attentive or
distracted). Critically, the acoustic analyses examined this predictor against the backdrop of
numerous control predictors that are expected to affect word duration. We controlled for speech
rate, calculated as the average time per syllable in the response utterance. Other control
predictors indexed characteristics of the preceding and following context (whether the participant
used a determiner, what the target word was preceded and followed by, and, for the color word
analysis, whether the color word was the last word in the sentence). Both lexical and acoustic
analyses included control variables about the experimental design (the current itemset, which
itemset had come first, which condition had come first, the current confederate, and item order).
(Table 1 about here)
For each analysis, we used the following procedure: a control model was constructed
first, containing all of the control variables, the random intercepts, but not the critical condition
predictor. Control variables that had a t-value of >1.5 were retained in the final model. This final
model was constructed, containing those control variables, plus condition. The model was
initially fit using a maximal random effects structure, including random intercepts for subject and
item/noun, and random slopes for subject x condition and item/noun x condition. If the model
did not converge or was not positive definite, we eliminated the random effects one at a time, in
this order: 1) item/noun x condition; 2) subject x condition; 3) item intercept. The variables
included in each model are shown in Table 1.
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Results
When the target was predictable (Exp. 1), speakers used more words to describe the
target object when confederates were distracted (mean = 1.68) than attentive (mean = 1.47);
t(477)= -2.39, p<.05). With predictable targets, there was also a marginal trend for participants to
speak more quickly in the attentive condition, as measured by time per syllable (t (430)= -2.14,
p=.03). In Experiment 2, there was no effect of condition on the number of words used to
describe unpredictable targets, (mean = 1.75), nor overall rate of speech.
The critical analyses concerned word duration, where we found an effect of condition on
the target noun in both experiments. Participants with distracted addressees produced target
words with longer durations than did speakers with attentive addressees, resulting in a main
effect of condition for both predictable targets in Experiment 1 (t(432)= -2.74, p<.01),
unpredictable targets in Experiment 2 (t(423)= -3.21, p<.01). There was also a significant effect
of condition on latency to begin speaking in Experiment 1: latency was longer with distracted
addressees than with attentive addressees (t(410)= -4.60, p<.0001). Condition did not affect
latency for Experiment 2. Analyses of the other two regions revealed no significant effect of
condition on duration of “the” or duration of the color word.
A visual examination of the average durations in Table 2 across the two experiments
shows that the averages are considerably longer in Experiment 2 than Experiment 1. This was
fully expected, given that the time to produce the first instruction may have been influenced by
the need to survey both objects for the trial, as well as the relative unpredictability of the target
object. This contrast was also orthogonal to the goals of the current study, so we did not submit
this comparison to statistical analysis.
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(Figure 1 about here)
(Table 2 about here)
Discussion
We found that people speak differently to distracted and attentive addressees, both in terms
of how much information they provided overall, and the acoustic prominence of key words in
their response. In general, distracted addressees elicited longer words and more detailed
utterances. The effect of distraction was robust against variation in the predictability of the target
object, and distracted addressees elicited longer target words than attentive addressees in both
experiments.
A comparison between this study and other studies suggests that speakers can respond to
distracted listeners differently depending on the task demands. In previous studies that required
participants to recall a narrative or tell a joke, speakers provided less information to distracted
listeners, as measured by shorter utterances and less detailed narratives (Kuhlen & Brennan,
2010; Pasupathi et al., 1998). These findings may reflect the social function of narratives and
jokes, as a disinterested listener may change the speaker’s task goals. In the current experiment
the task goals were clear and consistent, and the speaker’s utterances had the function of
instructing the addressee to move the correct object to the right location. This specific set of task
goals may have allowed speakers to assume that greater lexical detail and greater acoustic
prominence would facilitate successful task completion for a distracted listener.
Importantly, the increased duration in the distracted condition occurred specifically on
the target word, and not all regions in the utterance. In Experiment 1, this effect occurred over
and above the tendency for participants to speak faster with attentive addressees. In Experiment
2, there was no general rate change between conditions, yet participants still used longer
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durations for attentive addressees. This suggests that speakers were emphasizing words with high
information content for their listeners. The object name was especially critical for the initiation
of the action, which began with selecting the object.
Our results clearly indicate that speakers accommodate distracted addressees by varying
the acoustic prominence of their words. This finding contrasts with other studies in which
duration and intelligibility are frequently unaffected by the addressee’s knowledge (e.g., Bard &
Aylett, 2005; Bard et al.; 2000). This difference may have resulted from the fact that in our task,
speakers also did not have to keep track of what the addressee knew, as we were manipulating
the addressees’ obvious attention. Our task also made the communicative goal transparent, so
speakers were highly motivated to communicate clearly.
This study did not explicitly test the mechanism underlying the effects of addressee’s
attention, but we can speculatively offer some possibilities. A strong audience design explanation
of the increased object-name duration is that speakers were emphasizing the object’s name to
increase addressee understanding. Under this view, speakers in the distracted condition
recognized that their addressees needed extra help. This realization may have triggered a
speaking mode that provided additional information, which presumably would help the distracted
addressee complete the task. The fact that our durational effects were strongest on the target
noun is consistent with this view, since this is the piece of information most critical for initiating
the response. One question is why distraction had no effect on the color word, which presumably
was also an important piece of information for completing the task. We speculate that color word
duration was relatively stable, due to the fact that they were repeated throughout the experiment
and thus relatively facilitated. Additionally, color words are at the end of the sentence, so
speakers presumably had more time to plan.
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As Galati and Brennan (2010) suggest, this kind of addressee accommodation could be
done with a “one-bit model”. Speakers can calculate once for each block whether the addressee
is distracted, as this information is readily available and continually present, and this one-time
“either/or” decision can inform their speech for the entirety of the block. If this kind of
calculation underlies our effects, it would predict that speakers can accommodate distraction best
when the addressee’s attentional state is fairly constant. Whether speakers can adjust to moment-
by-moment changes in the addressee’s apparent attention is a topic for future research.
An alternate possibility is that the effects of distraction in our study are not the result of
audience design per se, but rather effects that the addressee’s behavior have on the speaker’s own
cognitive processes. For example, the addressee’s distraction may have led the speaker to be
distracted, or at the very least it may have affected the speaker’s ability to plan each utterance.
Words tend to be shorter when planning is facilitated (Bell et al., 2009; Christodoulou & Arnold,
2011; Kahn & Arnold, 2012, under review-a; see Arnold & Watson 2012, under review, for a
review), which means that audience design effects may be mediated by planning effects, as
opposed to an adjustment of speech forms on the basis of a specific representation of the
addressee’s needs. This possibility would be consistent with evidence that speakers choose more
explicit words when distracted (Rosa & Arnold, 2011).
This planning-based account is consistent with findings from a similar experiment,
reported by Arnold et al. (in press). Their experiment used a very similar paradigm, except that
the manipulation consisted of the addressee’s behavior immediately before the second instruction
– specifically, whether the addressee anticipated the target object or not. However, their findings
differ from the ones reported here. That study found that the addressee’s behavior affected the
latency to begin speaking, and the duration of the determiner the, but not the duration of the
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target word. Given that the latency and determiner regions are associated with utterance
planning, they interpreted that profile of results as evidence that the anticipation behavior
affected planning processes.
By contrast, the current experiment finds effects of distraction on target word duration,
and less clear effects on the planning regions. Distraction affected latency to speak in
Experiment 1, but not Experiment 2. There was no effect of condition on determinersi. This
difference is likely to stem from the nature of the manipulation. Distraction in the current study
was a salient, global manipulation, whereas Arnold et al. (in press) used a transitory
manipulation of anticipation. The salience of addressee distraction – and the fact that it could be
calculated on a one-bit model – may have facilitated the engagement of audience design
processes, in addition to any planning-mediated effects of addressee behavior.
In sum, our findings contribute to mounting evidence that variation in word duration is
affected by the speaker’s perception of the addressee’s behavior and/or mental state. This effect
goes beyond the influence of situational variables like the Lombard effect (Lane & Tranel,
1971). Moreover, we found that distraction has multiple effects, including the lexical specificity
of the utterance, the delay to begin speaking, and the duration of critical words. These findings
contribute to the idea that “audience design” is not a single process, and instead, a single
dimension – like word duration – can respond to addressee behavior in multiple ways.
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i The only analysis in which distraction affected determiner duration was for Experiment 2, when the analysis was
limited to items where the speaker used the intended label for the target object. In this analysis, the effect of
condition was marginal (t(248)=-1.92, p=.056).
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Table 1
Control variables and random effects in each model. For control variables, dashes mean that the
variable was not significant in the control model and was therefore not included in the final
model. The t-values mark significant effects and the direction of the effect (positive/negative);
N.S. means not significant. Empty boxes indicate the control variables were not included in the
control models. Models were run separately for Experiments 1 and 2.
# words target
area
target noun
duration
‘the’ duration Color duration Latency duration
Exp.1 Exp.2 Exp.1 Exp. 2 Exp.1 Exp. 2 Exp.1 Exp. 2 Exp. 1 Exp. 2
Itemset -- 3.34 -- -2.27 -- -- -- -- -- --
Itemset order -- -- -- 1.90 -- -- -- 3.62 -- --
Item order -- -2.68 -- -1.67 -- 2.70 -- -1.50 -3.34 -3.87
Condition order -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
target noun
syllables
6.39 9.37
Rate of speech 13.93 12.73 7.20 11.31 6.98 4.44 2.82 1.82
Use of determiner -- -2.26 -- -- N.S. --
Confederate N.S. -- -- N.S. -- N.S. N.S. N.S. -- --
Preceding word -- -3.59
Following word 2.82 2.76
Is color last word 4.02 9.01
Subject intercept * * * * * * * * * *
Item/noun
intercept
* * * * * * * * *
Subj x cond. slope * * *
Item/noun x cond
slope
*
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Table 2
Mean durations (ms) for each region in each condition
Latency ‘the’ Object Color
Attentive 666.36 105.46 363.63 268.48 Experiment 1:
Predictable
Distracted 851.4 112.03 401.42 275.47
Attentive 1490.05 212.63 464.83 334.2 Experiment 2:
Unpredictable
Distracted 1598.89 210.31 494.28 332.31
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Figure 1. Duration of target noun in Experiment 1 (left panel) and Experiment 2 (right panel).
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