Effects of Conversational Pressures on Speech Planning

In ordinary conversation, speakers experience pressures both to produce utterances suited to particular addressees and to do so with minimal delay. To document the impact of these conversational pressures, our experiment asked participants to produce brief utterances to describe visual displays. We complicated utterance planning by including tangram figures that prohibited easy lexicalization. Participants completed the task in either the presence or absence of an addressee and also under circumstances of natural or explicit time pressure. Results suggested that speakers produce richer utterances with addressees present but that they do so efficiently, without sacrificing planning time. We propose a good-enough view of the language production system: We suggest that, much like the comprehension system, speech planning processes flexibly adapt to external task goals.