PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Recent endeavors have successfully tried to equip dialogue systems withhesitations [1][2]. Hesitations are useful when it comes to buying dialogue time orto support listeners in comprehension [2]. It has been found that hesitations further-more create a bias towards complicated concepts [3]. In addition, one particularhesitation, namely lengthening, has gotten comparably little attention in research,despite its subtlety enables it to buy dialogue time without degrading sound quality[4]. In this paper, we investigate whether the hesitation bias can be replicated inclick tasks with ambiguous and complex color terms as hard-to-describe entities,that have audio instructions with and without hesitations. We hypothesize that,analogous to the studies by Arnold [3], listeners will infer that the target referent isa complicated rather than a simple color term when the instruction contains a hes-itation. While our studies cannot replicate the hesitation bias, we provide valuableinsights into the interaction between hesitations and speech processing as well asmethodological considerations for future research.