Repetition Facilitates Processing: The Processing Advantage of Construction Repetition in Dialogue

Anonymous

Abstract: Repetitions occur frequently in dialogue. This study focuses on the repetition of lexicalised constructions—i.e., recurring multi-word units—in English open domain spoken dialogues. We hypothesise that construction repetition is an efficient communication strategy that reduces processing effort, and make three predictions based on this hypothesis. Our three predictions are confirmed: repetitions facilitate the processing of constructions and of their linguistic context; facilitating effects are higher when repetitions accumulate, and lower when repetitions are less locally distributed. We measure reduction in processing effort using two surprisal-based measures and estimate surprisal with an adaptive neural language model. Our findings suggest that human-like patterns of repetitions can be learned implicitly by utterance generation models equipped with psycholinguistically motivated surprisal-based objectives and adaptation mechanisms.