THE FEELING OF ANOTHERS KNOWING - PROSODY AND FILLED PAUSES AS CUES TO LISTENERS ABOUT THE METACOGNITIVE STATES OF SPEAKERS

In question-answering, speakers display their metacognitive states usi ng filled pauses and prosody (Smith & Clark, 1993). We examined whethe r listeners are actually sensitive to this information. Experiment 1 r eplicated 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 me tacognitive information was reliably conveyed by the surface form of r esponses. For answers, rising intonation and Longer latencies led to f ewer FOAK ratings by listeners. For nonanswers, longer latencies led t o higher FOAK ratings. In Experiment 3, electronically edited response s with 1-s latencies led to higher FOAK ratings for answers and lower FOAK ratings for nonanswers than those with 5-s latencies. Filled paus es led to lower ratings for answers and higher ratings for nonanswers than did unfilled pauses. There was no support for a filler-as-morphem e hypothesis, that ''um'' and ''uh'' contrast in meaning. We conclude that listeners can interpret the metacognitive information that speake rs display about their states of knowledge in question-answering. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.