Clock time naming: Complexities of a simple task

Clock Time Naming: Complexities of a Simple Task Simone A. Sprenger (simone.sprenger@mpi.nl) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; P.O. Box 310 NL-6525 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands Hedderik van Rijn (hedderik@ai.rug.nl) University of Groningen, Department of Artificial Intelligence; Grote Kruisstraat 2/1 NL-9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands A Abstract Performance in relative clock time naming (e.g., pronouncing 3:50 as “ten to four”) has been described as depending on three factors: reference hour determination, minute transformation, and an additional distance component (Meeuwissen, Roelofs & Levelt, 2003). However, this model does not specify the cognitive operations that are responsible for the distance effect. We present three hypotheses about the factors that determine clock time latencies: physical distance, arithmetics, and frequency of the expression. Three experiments and a corpus analysis that test these hypotheses are presented. Regression models of speech onset latencies for an extended set of clock times show clear contributions of all three factors and explain most of the variance associated with this task. h uur ’h hour’, h o’clock B: m over h H: 60-m voor h+1 ‘60-m before h+1’ kwart voor h+1 ‘quarter to h+1’ G F: m-30 over half h+1 H or F H B F D ‘m-30 past h+1’ ‘m past h’ B or D C kwart over h ‘quarter past h’ D: 30-m voor half h+1 ‘30-m before half h+1’ E half h+1 (‘half h+1’) Figure 1: Preferred utterance formats for relative clock times in Dutch. Keywords: clock time naming, language production, phrases. the distance (in minutes) between the minutes and their ref- erence point. Utterances referring to the full hour (Figure 1, Format B) were faster than utterances referring to the next full hour (H), which in turn were faster than utterances re- ferring to the half hour (D,F). The longer the distance (0, 5, or 10 minutes) between the minutes on the display and their reference point, the longer it took to initiate the utterance. In addition, Meeuwissen et al. found an interaction between dis- tance and reference point, indicating that the distance effect is stronger for clock time naming latencies around the half hour and the next full hour. The authors explain their findings by means of a procedu- ral semantics for clock time naming, in which there are sep- arate semantic procedures for determining the full hour (h) and the next full hour (h+1). Since clock times that refer to the next full hour always require the determination of both h and h+1, speech onset latencies are predicted to be longer for these times. Furthermore, Meeuwissen et al. explain the interaction be- tween reference point and distance as an effect of the numer- ical transformation that is required for minutes relative to the half hour and the next full hour, but not relative to the full hour (e.g., h:20 becomes ten before half h+1, whereas h:10 remains ten past h). To summarize, Meeuwissen et al.’s model explains the speech onset latencies for clock time naming by means of three factors: (1) numerical transformation of the hour, (2) numerical transformation of the minutes, and (3) distance be- tween the minutes to be transformed and their reference point. While (1) and (2) seem rather straightforward explanations for an increase in reaction times, the third factor remains puz- Clock time naming In a series of recent papers (Bock, Irwin, Davidson & Lev- elt, 2003; Meeuwissen, Roelofs & Levelt, 2003, 2004) clock time naming has been established as a new paradigm to study the production of multi-word utterances. It can be seen as a special variant of the picture naming paradigm that allows to elicit complex spoken responses without additional training, due to the universal familiarity of clock faces and the task of telling the time. Bock et al. (2003) showed that while the stimulus is uni- versal, the format of the utterance that is used to express time varies both between and within languages. Most importantly, languages like English and Dutch (among many others) offer two alternative ways of telling the time: either using an abso- lute system (three fifteen) or using a relative system (quarter past three). Testing five-minute intervals, Bock et al. showed that native speakers of Dutch prefer a relative system that uses the full and the half hour as reference points. Thus, Dutch speakers say tien over h ’ten past h’ when the clock shows h:10 and vijf voor half h+1 ’five before half h+1’ when the clock shows h:25. According to Bock et al., the reference point (half hour or hour) changes at twenty and forty minutes past the full hour (h:20 and h:40), respectively. In addition, the reference hour that is named in the utterance (h or h+1) changes at twenty minutes past the full hour. Figure 1 shows how the different utterance formats relate to the clock times. Meeuwissen et al. (2003) measured Dutch clock time nam- ing latencies for five-minute intervals on the digital clock (hour:minutes, h:mm), using the relative system. They found effects of the type of reference point (h, half h+1, h+1) and