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 we make three predictions based on this hypothesis. We conduct a quantitative analysis, measuring reduction in processing effort via two surprisal-based measures and estimating surprisal with an adaptive neural language model. Our three predictions are confirmed: (i)~repetitions facilitate the processing of constructions and of their linguistic context; (ii)~facilitating effects are higher when repetitions accumulate, (iii)~and they are lower when repetitions are less locally distributed. Our findings suggest that human-like patterns of repetitions can be learned implicitly by utterance generation models equipped with psycholinguistically motivated learning objectives and adaptation mechanisms.

Paper Type: long