Conversation demands attention. Speakers must call words to mind, listeners must make sense of them, and both together must negotiate this flow of information, all in fractions of a second. We used large language models to study how this works in a large-scale dataset of English-language conversation, the CANDOR corpus. We provide a new estimate of the information density of unstructured conversation, of approximately 13 bits/second, and find significant effects associated with the cognitive load of both retrieving, and presenting, that information. We also reveal a role for backchannels -- the brief yeahs, uh-huhs, and mhmms that listeners provide -- in regulating the production of novelty: the lead-up to a backchannel is associated with declining information rate, while speech downstream rebounds to previous rates. Our results provide new insights into long-standing theories of how we respond to fluctuating demands on cognitive resources, and how we negotiate those demands in partnership with others.
@article{arxiv.2403.08890,
title = {From "um" to "yeah": Producing, predicting, and regulating information flow in human conversation},
author = {Claire Augusta Bergey and Simon DeDeo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.08890},
year = {2024}
}