Research report 2012 - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Think before you speak? The temporal coordination of thinking and speaking
Authors
Konopka, Agnieszka; van de Velde, Maartje; Meyer, Antje
Departments
Psychologie der Sprache
Summary
In everyday conversations, we often begin to speak before we fully determined what we are going to say and how we are going to say it. But how are speaking and thinking coordinated in time? How far do speakers think ahead? Scientists at the MPI for Psycholinguistics illustrate how analyses of the speakers' eye movements can be used to assess this question. Their studies show how the time course of sentence preparation is shaped by the content and form of the utterance that speakers produce. These findings suggest new perspectives on the relationship between thought and language.