Implementing discourse-gating tasks to study the timing of speech act recognition

This paper presents the development of two novel discourse-gating tasks to investigate the processing of pragmatic information, namely, the timing of the recognition of genuine (sincere) and ostensible (transparently insincere) refusals in Chinese and provides preliminary validity evidence for the tasks. Gating tasks were introduced to investigate spoken word recognition and have been successfully extended to spoken language processing, most notably sentences. Following Grosjean's (1996) observation that gating tasks could be used to investigate a variety of linguistic features, we extended the gating tasks to spoken discourse using turns as gates. The open-prediction gating task allows participants to make a single prediction about the outcome of each of 12 recorded conversations as soon as they can. The fixed-prediction gating task asks participants to make predictions at regular intervals while listening to a second set of 12 conversations. One hundred and seven participants (60 L1 speakers and 47 third- and fourth-year learners of Chinese) were recruited to test the tasks. The tasks reveal a lag in speech-act identification not found when retrospective speech-act identification tasks are used. The fixed-prediction task additionally reveals alternatives that are considered during processing. The paper discusses the benefits of the discourse gating tasks and the merits of each, the quantitative and qualitative evidence for the tasks, and future directions for discourse gating tasks.