Response planning during question-answering: Does deciding what to say involve deciding how to say it?

Ruth E. Corps*, Martin J. Pickering

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

To answer a question, speakers must determine their response and formulate it in words. But do they decide on a response before formulation, or do they formulate different potential answers before selecting one? We addressed this issue in a verbal question-answering experiment. Participants answered questions more quickly when they had one potential answer (e.g., Which tourist attraction in Paris is very tall?) than when they had multiple potential answers (e.g., What is the name of a Shakespeare play?). Participants also answered more quickly when the set of potential answers were on average short rather than long, regardless of whether there was only one or multiple potential answers. Thus, participants were not affected by the linguistic complexity of unselected but plausible answers. These findings suggest that participants select a single answer before formulation.

Original languageEnglish
JournalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review
Early online date22 Sept 2023
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 22 Sept 2023

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • language production
  • question-answering
  • response planning

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