Linguistic cognitive load : implications for automotive UIs

This position paper describes an approach to speech-driven user interfaces for automotive drivers. Drivers divide their attention between hands-free electronic devices and the necessity of driving safely. These devices are often controlled via spoken dialogue interfaces, which impose their own burden on driver attention. We argue for an approach that modulates the complexity of the user interface with ongoing driving conditions using psycholinguistic measures of language complexity, and we describe an overall system design in the context of research into language in divided-attention contexts. Our system design uses a given language complexity metric to calibrate the rate of syntactic and semantic information transfer between the driver and the synthetic speech interface in order to prioritise safe driving while permitting the driver to perform auxiliary tasks.

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