| Abstract |
| In question-answering, speakers display
their metacognitive states using filled pauses and prosody (Smith & Clark,
1993). We examined whether listeners are actually sensitive to this
information. Experiment 1 replicated Smith and Clark's study; respondents were
tested on general knowledge questions, surveyed about their FOK (feeling-of-knowing) for
these questions, and tested for recognition of answers. In Experiment 2, listeners
heard spontaneous verbal responses from Experiment 1 and were tested on their
feeling-of-another's-knowing (FOAK) to see if metacognitive information was reliably
conveyed by the surface form of responses. For answers, rising intonation and longer
latencies led to lower FOAK ratings by listeners. for nonanswers, longer latenceies
led to higher FOAK ratings. In experiment 3, electronically edited responses with
1-s latencies led to higher FOAK ratings for answers and lower FOAK ratings for nonanswers
than those with 5-s latencies. Filled pauses led to lower ratings for answers and
higher ratings for nonanswers than did unfilled pauses. There was no support for a
filler-as-morpheme hypothesis, that "um" and "uh" contrast in
meaning. We conclude that listeners can interpret the metacognitive information that
speakers display about their states of knowledge in question-answering. |
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