Mental Workload and Language Production in Non-Native Speaker IPA Interaction

Abstract

Through smartphones and smart speakers, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have made speech a common interaction modality. With linguistic coverage and varying functionality levels, many speakers engage with IPAs using a non-native language. This may impact mental workload and patterns of language production used by non-native speakers. We present a mixed-design experiment, where native (L1) and non-native (L2) English speakers completed tasks with IPAs via smartphones and smart speakers. We found significantly higher mental workload for L2 speakers in IPA interactions. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found no significant differences between L1 and L2 speakers in number of turns, lexical complexity, diversity, or lexical adaptation when encountering errors. These findings are discussed in relation to language production and processing load increases for L2 speakers in IPA interaction.