Is there a hesitation bias for ambiguous color terms?

Abstract:

Recent endeavors have successfully tried to equip dialogue systems with hesitations [1][2]. Hesitations are useful when it comes to buying dialogue time or to support listeners in comprehension [2]. It has been found that hesitations furthermore create a bias towards complicated concepts [3]. In addition, one particular hesitation, namely lengthening, has gotten comparably little attention in research, despite its subtlety enables it to buy dialogue time without degrading sound quality [4]. In this paper, we investigate whether the hesitation bias can be replicated in click tasks with ambiguous and complex color terms as hard-to-describe entities, that have audio instructions with and without hesitations. We hypothesize that, analogous to the studies by Arnold [3], listeners will infer that the target referent is a complicated rather than a simple color term when the instruction contains a hesitation. While our studies cannot replicate the hesitation bias, we provide valuable insights into the interaction between hesitations and speech processing as well as methodological considerations for future research.


Year: 2022
In session: Articulatory Synthesis
Pages: 59 to 66