Hesitation Lengthening Elicitation and Detection via Target Words in a Card Game Study

Authors: Simon Betz

Abstract:

We have created a strategic card game as a framework to elicit hesitations under varying degrees of cognitive load. In this study we investigate whether there is a special role of property words with regard to hesitations. We have shown that our framework elicits unusually large amounts of hesitations, now we investigate whether property words, specifically, color words exhibit a "magnetism" for hesitations. We assume this because our game setup dictates that colors are the main objects that participants have to consider, so it could be that hesitations gravitate towards the concepts that speakers think about. Another aspect that we regard in this study is the question whether it is possible to build a simple classifier that can detect hesitation lengthening on said color words using read samples as a baseline. To foreshadow the results, we do not observe a "hesitation magnetism" of property words, and the simple classification method exhibits high recall but low precision.