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Do speakers and listeners observe the Gricean Maxim of Quantity?
Abstract
The Gricean Maxim of Quantity is believed to govern linguistic performance. Speakers are assumed to provide as much information as required for referent identification and no more, and listeners are believed to expect unambiguous but concise descriptions. In three experiments we examined the extent to which naïve participants are sensitive to the Maxim of Quantity. The first was a production experiment which demonstrated that speakers over-describe almost one-third of the time. The second experiment showed that listeners do not judge over-descriptions to be any worse than concise expressions. The third experiment used the Visual World Paradigm to assess listeners’ moment-by-moment interpretations of over-described utterances. This last experiment revealed that over-descriptions trigger eye movements that can be interpreted as indicating confusion. The results provide support for the use of a simple heuristic such as Minimal Attachment or Argument Saturation to create an initial parse. We conclude that people are only moderately Gricean.
... In general, there is ample evidence that speakers are routinely overinformative at the informational level, and that speaker overinformativity is frequently tolerated by listeners (Baker et al., 2008;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Walker, 1993). In this chapter and the next, I explore the question of whether there is empirical evidence for a constraint against redundant speech as a communicatively irrational act -meaning, one which negatively affects communication between interlocutors. ...
... In most experimental work, informational redundancy has been described as a problem of overinformativeness, overspecification, or overdescription, and as addressed by the second part of Grice's Quantity Maxim, which states that speakers should provide no more information than is necessary to get their message across. However, overinformativeness in the pragmatic literature has rather confusingly been used to refer to both informational redundancy (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Grice, 1975), as well as to the relative informativeness of terms on an implicational scale (e.g., the use of some when all is sufficient) (Horn, 1984;Levinson, 2000). The latter variety of overinformativeness, now ore typically associated with the Quantity Maxim, is more a problem of unjustified vagueness where a more precise description is available. ...
... Most experimental work on production and comprehension of informationally redundant utterances has focused on nominal modification in referent identification tasks, which typically instruct participants to look at or somehow engage with items such as: the [red] apple, the [tall] boot (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Sedivy, 2003;Davies & Katsos, 2010Pogue et al., 2016). The aim of these studies has been to determine some combination of the following: 1) whether overinformative descriptions are perceived as infelicitous by comprehenders (i.e., whether overinformativeness apparently violates some communicative norm); 2) whether overinformativeness helps, hinders, or has no effect on object identification; 3) whether comprehenders attempt to accommodate overinformative descriptions by making inferences which increase the informational utility of the descriptions; and 4) whether comprehenders alter their beliefs about the rationality of the speaker (or the baseline informativeness of their speech) following use of overinformative descriptions. ...
... In particular, we examine potential age differences in both incremental comprehension and memory performance using a design in which we vary both the kind of redundant modifer in referential descriptions (color or state vs. none), and whether this information can be used to direct visual attention to a unique candidate. We also explore participants' explicit judgments about the informativity of redundant descriptions, which sometimes appear to be disconnected with the effects of redundancy on real-time processing (e.g., Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006). The spoken descriptions are provided by a robot, which makes the task more interactive than previous studies, yet retains experimental control over the uniformity of spoken materials. ...
... Referring expressions that include too much information are called overspecified, whereas those that provide too little information are called underspecified. Although the latter is a less common occurrence in language production, both younger and older speakers have been found to overspecify when referring to objects in the visual environment (e.g., Engelhardt et al., 2006;Healey & Grossman, 2016;Long, Rohde, & Rubio-Fernandez, 2020;Pechmann, 1989;Rubio-Fernandez, 2019;Saryazdi et al., 2019). This arguable violation to Grice's Maxim of Quantity has been a topic of much debate. ...
... But do these redundancies actually facilitate listeners' real-time comprehension? Although there is some evidence to suggest that overspecification aids comprehension (e.g., Arts, Maes, Noordman, & Jansen, 2011;Paraboni & Van Deemter, 2014;Tourtouri et al., 2015Tourtouri et al., , 2019, there is also some evidence suggesting that it impairs comprehension (e.g., Davies & Katsos, 2013;Engelhardt et al., 2006Engelhardt et al., , 2011. For the latter case, studies involving real-time syntactic processing conducted within the "Referential Theory" tradition (Altmann & Steedman, 1988;Crain & Steedman, 1985) have shown that a redundant modifier phrase can be temporarily misconstrued as serving another grammatical role. ...
Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults’ comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to age-related decline (e.g., processing speed and memory) or their greater proclivity for linguistic redundancy, as suggested in language production studies. The present study explores the effects of linguistic redundancy on younger and older listeners’ incremental referential processing, judgments of informativity, and downstream memory performance. In an eye tracking task, gaze was monitored as listeners followed instructions from a social robot referring to a unique object within a multi-object display. Critical trials were varied in terms of modifier type (“…closed/purple/[NONE] umbrella”) and whether displays contained another object matching target properties (closed purple notebook), making modifiers less effective at narrowing attention. Relative to unmodified descriptions, redundant color modifiers facilitated comprehension, particularly when they narrowed attention to a single referent. Descriptions with redundant state modifiers always impaired real-time comprehension. In contrast, memory measures showed faster recognition of objects previously described with redundant state modifiers. Although color and state descriptions had different effects on referential processing and memory, informativity judgments showed participants perceived them as informationally redundant to the same extent relative to unmodified descriptions. Importantly, the patterns did not differ by listener age. Together, the results show that the effects of linguistic redundancy are stable across adulthood but vary as a function of modifier type, visual context, and the measured phenomenon.
... There is ample evidence that speakers are routinely overinformative at the informational level, and that speaker overinformativity is frequently tolerated by listeners (Baker, Gill, & Cassell, 2008;Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Walker, 1993). In this paper, we explore the question of whether there is empirical evidence for comprehenders noticing and reacting to informational redudancy by deriving pragmatic inferences. ...
... In most experimental work, informational redundancy has been described as a problem of overinformativeness, overspecification or overdescription, and as addressed by the second part of Grice's Quantity Maxim, which states that speakers should provide no more information than is necessary to get their message across. However, the term informativeness in the pragmatic literature has been used to refer to both informational redundancy (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Grice, 1975) and its converse, as well as to the relative informativeness of terms in an implicational scale (Horn, 1984;Levinson, 2000). The latter variety of informativeness, now more typically associated with the Quantity Maxim, is invoked more in reference to unjustified vagueness where a more precise description is available, but where both descriptions are similar or equal in length and effort. ...
... These tasks typically instruct participants to look at or somehow engage with items such as: the [red] apple, the [tall] boot (Davies & Katsos, 2010Engelhardt et al., 2006;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Pogue, Kurumada, & Tanenhaus, 2016;Sedivy, 2003). What has been found is that in interactive, spontaneous speech, speakers frequently modify nouns with adjectives that are not strictly necessary for referent identification (e.g., referring to a cup as the red cup, in a context where there are no other cups of any color) (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002). ...
... In recent decades, there has also been an increasing interest among psycholinguists in the psychological reality of Gricean 's rules about informativeness on linguistic comprehension (Anja Arts, Maes, Noordman, & Jansen, 2011;Davies & Katsos, 2013;Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006;Geurts & Rubio-Fernández, 2015). Whether the violation of Gricean maxims will cause difficulty in the interpretation of sentences has been a hotly debated question. ...
... There have been numerous studies regarding this topic. Although some studies have shown that the provision of incomplete information has induced incomprehension (Davies & Katsos, 2013;Engelhardt et al., 2006). Some have recorded no such drawbacks (Engelhardt et al., 2006), and some have also demonstrated the benefits of unnecessary information (Anja Arts et al., 2011;Geurts & Rubio-Fernández, 2015). ...
... Although some studies have shown that the provision of incomplete information has induced incomprehension (Davies & Katsos, 2013;Engelhardt et al., 2006). Some have recorded no such drawbacks (Engelhardt et al., 2006), and some have also demonstrated the benefits of unnecessary information (Anja Arts et al., 2011;Geurts & Rubio-Fernández, 2015). ...
This study aims at analyzing the violation of the maxim of quantity produced by undergraduate students in research seminar and the reason why they violate this kind of maxim. The researchers applied qualitative research design by using observation and in-depth interview. Four undergraduate students were the participants of this research recruiting using purposive random sampling. The results show that most of the participants violated the maxim of quantity by doing circumlocution (not to the point), providing more explanation, and talking too much. They considered that it was valuable for them to provide more information than needed to obtain the attention of the examiners. They assume that the more they speak the good outcome for their research seminar will be accomplished because having more explanation means they master their research content well.
... In this case, you-that is, the listener-might try to reason about this lack of information, and, if there is no evidence that your friend is in fact uncooperative, you might infer that, for example, only one of the two balls is visible from where she stands. In any case, underspecifications lead to referential failure, as the listener is in no position to resolve reference (Davies & Katsos, 2013;Engelhardt et al., 2006). ...
... Contra the Gricean view-which deems only minimal specifications to be optimalspeakers do frequently overspecify (Davies & Katsos, 2013;Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Gatt et al., 2017;Mangold & Pobel, 1988;Koolen et al., 2011Koolen et al., , 2013Koolen et al., , 2016Pechmann, 1989;Rubio-Fernández, 2016, 2019Tarenskeen et al., 2015;Tourtouri et al., 2019;van Gompel et al., 2019;Vogels et al., 2019, i.a.). Although the Gricean theory does not make predictions regarding the psychological reality of violating the maxims (for discussion see Geurts & Rubio-Fernández, 2015;Noveck & Reboul, 2008), it does have implications for rational listeners to the extent that they expect speakers to observe the conversational principle and the maxims that follow from it (Grice, 1989). ...
... The question is, therefore, raised: How does the use of redundant adjectives influence listeners' referential processing? Empirical studies have to date provided mixed evidence (Arts et al., 2011a;Brodbeck et al., 2015;Davies & Katsos 2013;Engelhardt et al., 2006Engelhardt et al., , 2011Fukumura & Carminati, 2021;Rehring et al., 2021;Rubio-Fernández, 2020;Sedivy et al., 1999;Tourtouri et al., 2019, i.a.). These studies, however, vary in important aspects, such as the referential set size (mostly using limited contexts of up to four referents), or the kind of adjectives used redundantly (usually color and size adjectives). ...
In referential communication, Grice's Maxim of Quantity is thought to imply that utterances conveying unnecessary information should incur comprehension difficulties. There is, however, considerable evidence that speakers frequently encode redundant information in their referring expressions, raising the question as to whether such overspecifications hinder listeners’ processing. Evidence from previous work is inconclusive, and mostly comes from offline studies. In this article, we present two event-related potential (ERP) experiments, investigating the real-time comprehension of referring expressions that contain redundant adjectives in complex visual contexts. Our findings provide support for both Gricean and bounded-rational accounts. We argue that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if common ground is taken into account. We propose a bounded-rational account of overspecification, according to which even redundant words can be beneficial to comprehension to the extent that they facilitate the reduction of listeners’ uncertainty regarding the target referent.
... The second set of intriguing results in the referential communication literature shows that speakers produce adjectives not only when they are necessary to preempt an ambiguity with a competitor, but also when they are unnecessary in the visual context (e.g., Arts, Maes, Noordman, & Jansen, 2011a;Belke, 2006;Maes, Arts, & Noordman, 2004;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Sedivy, 2003Sedivy, , 2005. Some researchers have argued that speakers tend to overspecify visually salient properties (such as color) because it is easier than having to identify a referent's competitors and directly compare them (Pechmann, 1989;Belke & Meyer, 2002;Belke, 2006;Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006;Koolen, Goudbeek, & Krahmer, 2013;Fukumura & Carminati, 2021). This interpretation is in line with the view that referential overspecification is driven by speakerinternal processes, whereby the speaker fails to adopt the listener's perspective and produce an optimally informative description (for review and discussion, see Arnold, 2008;Davies & Arnold, 2019). ...
... However, this 'negative view' of referential overspecification rests on the assumption that overinformative expressions violate the Maxim of Quantity, according to which speakers should not provide their listeners with more information than is necessary (Grice, 1975). As a violation of the Gricean maxim, redundancy is understood to be detrimental for the listener (see Davies & Katsos, 2013;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Engelhardt, Demiral, & Ferreira, 2011). ...
... Finally, the last experiment in the study aimed to investigate the nature of the perceptual contrast heuristic. A general assumption that is often mentioned as an explanation for color overspecification is that color is a visually salient property (e.g., Pechmann, 1989;Belke & Meyer, 2002;Belke, 2006;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Arts et al., 2011b;Koolen et al., 2013;van Gompel et al., 2019;Degen et al., 2020). Despite the widespread reliance on visual salience to explain people's frequent use of color adjectives, psycholinguistic and computational studies on reference production normally work with an intuitive, non-technical notion of visual salience. ...
We hypothesize that contrast perception works as a visual heuristic, such that when speakers perceive a significant degree of contrast in a visual context, they tend to produce the corresponding adjective to describe a referent. The contrast perception heuristic supports efficient audience design, allowing speakers to produce referential expressions with minimum expenditure of cognitive resources, while facilitating the listener's visual search for the referent. We tested the perceptual contrast hypothesis in three language-production experiments. Experiment 1 revealed that speakers overspecify color adjectives in polychrome displays, whereas in mono-chrome displays they overspecified other properties that were contrastive. Further support for the contrast perception hypothesis comes from a re-analysis of previous work, which confirmed that color contrast elicits color overspecification when detected in a given display, but not when detected across monochrome trials. Experiment 2 revealed that even atypical colors (which are often overspecified) are only mentioned if there is color contrast. In Experiment 3, participants named a target color faster in monochrome than in polychrome displays, suggesting that the effect of color contrast is not analogous to ease of production. We conclude that the tendency to overspecify color in polychrome displays is not a bottom-up effect driven by the visual salience of color as a property, but possibly a learned communicative strategy. We discuss the implications of our account for pragmatic theories of referential communication and models of audience design, challenging the view that overspecification is a form of egocentric behavior.
... This finding has generally been interpreted as a challenge to the standard theory of communication proposed by philosopher Paul Grice (1975), according to which speakers should not make their contributions more informative than necessary for the purpose of the exchange. In line with the Gricean Maxim of Quantity, the general assumption in the experimental literature is that shorter referential expressions are preferable over redundant ones because the latter require extra effort to produce and time to process, with no added informational value (e.g., Pechmann, 1989;Sedivy, 2003Sedivy, , 2004Engelhardt et al., 2006Engelhardt et al., , 2011Koolen et al., 2013). This means color words should only be used when they are necessary (e.g., to distinguish two cups of different colors) and have informational value; otherwise shorter descriptions are preferred. ...
... Such a situation would arise if a speaker requested "the blue cup" from a cluttered breakfast table, for example, on the mistaken assumption that there must be other cups on the table. Research on referential over-specification has often argued that indeed, speakers use color adjectives redundantly in order to pre-empt a possible ambiguity when they have not scanned the scene for competitors (Pechmann, 1989;Belke and Meyer, 2002;Belke, 2006;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2013;Fukumura and Carminati, 2021). However, to the best of my knowledge, this general assumption remains untested. ...
... The effect of redundant modification on visual search A number of psycholinguistic studies since the 80's have investigated the effect of redundancy on reference resolution, with mixed results: some studies have shown that redundancy hinders referential communication, while others revealed that adding extra information facilitates the identification of the intended referent. Supporting the traditional view that redundancy is inefficient, several psycholinguistic studies have shown that redundant descriptions can impair communication (Engelhardt et al., 2006(Engelhardt et al., , 2011Davies and Katsos, 2013). However, upon closer inspection of their materials, the redundant information used in these studies may not have had discriminatory value that could facilitate visual search. ...
A psychophysical analysis of referential communication establishes a causal link between a visual stimulus and a speaker’s perception of this stimulus, and between the speaker’s internal representation and their reference production. Here, I argue that, in addition to visual perception and language, social cognition plays an integral part in this complex process, as it enables successful speaker-listener coordination. This pragmatic analysis of referential communication tries to explain the redundant use of color adjectives. It is well documented that people use color words when it is not necessary to identify the referent; for instance, they may refer to “the blue star” in a display of shapes with a single star. This type of redundancy challenges influential work from cognitive science and philosophy of language, suggesting that human communication is fundamentally efficient. Here, I explain these seemingly contradictory findings by confirming the visual efficiency hypothesis: redundant color words can facilitate the listener’s visual search for a referent, despite making the description unnecessarily long. Participants’ eye movements revealed that they were faster to find “the blue star” than “the star” in a display of shapes with only one star. A language production experiment further revealed that speakers are highly sensitive to a target’s discriminability, systematically reducing their use of redundant color adjectives as the color of the target became more pervasive in a display. It is concluded that a referential expression’s efficiency should be based not only on its informational value, but also on its discriminatory value, which means that redundant color words can be more efficient than shorter descriptions.
... Besides color, other properties have also been investigated, namely size, shape, material, pattern, location, orientation (Belke and Meyer, 2002;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Arts et al., 2011;Brown-Schmidt and Konopka, 2011;Koolen et al., 2011;Gatt et al., 2013;Van Gompel et al., 2014;Tarenskeen et al., 2015;Rubio-Fernandez, 2016, 2019, 2021Long et al., 2021;Rubio-Fernandez et al., 2021;among others). The studies reported that these properties are less salient than color. ...
... Firstly, color has been acknowledged to be an absolute and very salient property, thus yielding much higher over-specification rates than any other property: size, shape, pattern, etc. (cf. Belke and Meyer, 2002;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Arts et al., 2011;Brown-Schmidt and Konopka, 2011;Koolen et al., 2011;Gatt et al., 2013;Van Gompel et al., 2014;Tarenskeen et al., 2015;Rubio-Fernandez, 2016, 2019, 2021Long et al., 2021;Rubio-Fernandez et al., 2021;among others). Moreover, its over-specification has been claimed to be dependent on discriminability of surrounding environment: polychrome contexts, or higher color discriminability, give rise to higher over-specification rates than monochrome contexts, or lower color discriminability (cf. ...
This paper reports on two flash-mode experiments that test redundant descriptions of small (2–4) cardinalities, borderline (5–8) cardinalities, and color in referential communication. It provides further support for the idea that small cardinalities are more salient (due to subitizing), less sensitive to visual context, and therefore give rise to higher over-specification rates than color. Because of greater salience, Russian speakers more often use prenominal positions for numerals than for color adjectives. The paper also investigates borderline cardinalities and argues for the order factor that affects their salience, since ordered items can be perceived in small subitized parts. The ordered mode of presentation of the borderline cardinalities leads to higher over-specification rates and to higher percentages of prenominal positions than the unordered one. The paper provides further evidence for the consistency of small, borderline cardinalities, and color in people’s choices to minimally specify or over-specify given objects in referential communication.
... The rate of overmodification with color terms has been shown to vary in structured ways (Pechmann, 1989;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2011). Non-color-diagnostic objects, which occur in a variety of colors equally frequently (e.g., cups), are readily overmodified (Sedivy, 2003;Rubio-Fernández, 2016). ...
... Overmodification by speakers is a robustly reported phenomenon on referring expression production (Pechmann, 1989;Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;Sedivy, 2003;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2011;Rubio-Fernández, 2016;Heller, 2020). Color adjectives stand out since their rate of overmodification is generally higher than for other modifiers such as size and material (Pechmann, 1989;Sedivy, 2005;Mitchell et al., 2013;Gatt et al., 2011). ...
Speakers' referential expressions often depart from communicative ideals in ways that help illuminate the nature of pragmatic language use. Patterns of overmodification, in which a speaker uses a modifier that is redundant given their communicative goal, have proven especially informative in this regard. It seems likely that these patterns are shaped by the environment a speaker is exposed to in complex ways. Unfortunately, systematically manipulating these factors during human language acquisition is impossible. In this paper, we propose to address this limitation by adopting neural networks (NN) as learning agents. By systematically varying the environments in which these agents are trained, while keeping the NN architecture constant, we show that overmodification is more likely with environmental features that are infrequent or salient. We show that these findings emerge naturally in the context of a probabilistic model of pragmatic communication.
... The results suggest that English, French, and German speakers focused on different visual regions when they encountered sentences violating the maxim of Manner. Another eye-tracking study [30] investigated whether participants were sensitive to the violations of Gricean maxim of Quantity. The results suggest that the violation of the maxim of Quantity might have a moderate effect on communication success, such that people are sensitive to undershared information but not to overshared information. ...
... Participants tend to keep their attention in the task area but partake in visual exploration to compare and evaluate the given information for the task equipment. Our results add on to the related work, which suggests that the presence of overshared information due to the maxim of Quantity might result in confusion [30]. A similar effect was visible but less effective in the Quantity, Quality, and Manner violation conditions. ...
Linguistic principles are crucial in maintaining reliable and transparent communication for dyadic interactions. However, violating these principles might result in unwieldy and problematic communications. We use gaze as a medium to explore how visual attention and task performance changes when conversational violations occur. We conducted an eye-tracking study (N=17) measuring changes in visual patterns in response to social communication errors, specifically Grice’s Maxims violations. Our study investigates how social-communicative errors influence task performance and gaze during dyadic and collaborative social interactions. The results suggest participants’ visual exploration patterns shift towards the violator when the maxim of Relation is violated in a task instruction. Gaze stays mainly within the task area after receiving instructions with Quantity, Quality, and Manner violations. Moreover, it takes longer to respond to task instructions that include Quantity and Quality violations, than the Manner and Relation violations. Finally, our qualitative analysis revealed participants' adaptive and non-adaptive strategies in response to the Quality violation. Our findings contribute to the design space of human performance in dyadic and collaborative interactions, with future work implications exploring human performance in joint system-human interactions.
... Having established that speakers are influenced by a change in their partner's linguistic behavior to switch from overspecifying to minimally specifying, we turned our attention to whether they would be similarly influenced to switch to overspecifying. Previous research has implied overspecification to be a suboptimal speaker strategy as it involves encoding more information than is necessary, and may at times even impede communication (e.g., Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006). Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that we found that speakers continued to align with a partner whose referential strategy switched to minimal specification, which may have been seen as more optimal from a production perspective. ...
... An interesting question to address is whether speakers would be similarly ready to align with a partner whose referential strategy is less felicitous, such as one who consistently underspecifies, or who switches from overspecification to underspecification. Research from referential production and comprehension shows that speakers routinely penalize underspecific utterances more than overspecific ones (Davies & Katsos, 2010;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Pogue, Kurumada, & Tanenhaus, 2016), reflecting an asymmetric tolerance for specificity violations. It stands to reason, therefore, that speakers may be less willing to align with an underspecific partner in interaction. ...
Speakers often overspecify by encoding more information than is necessary when referring to an object (e.g., “the blue mug” for the only mug in a group of objects). We investigated the role of a partner's linguistic behavior (whether or not they overspecify) on a speaker's own tendency to overspecify. We used a director–matcher task in which speakers interacted with a partner who either consistently overspecified or minimally specified in the color/size dimension (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), as well as with a partner who switched behaviors midway through interaction (Experiments 4 and 5). We found that speakers aligned with their partner's linguistic behavior to produce overspecific or minimally specific descriptions, and we saw little evidence that the alignment was enhanced by lexical or semantic repetition across prime and target trials. Time-course analyses showed that alignment increased over the course of the interaction, and speakers appeared to track a change in the partner's linguistic behavior, altering their reference strategy to continue matching that of their partner's. These results demonstrate the persistent influence of a partner's behavior on speakers across the duration of an interaction.
... Finally, in our analyses we have made the simplified assumption that speakers want to provide the right amount of information, avoiding overinformative utterances. There is literature showing that this is not always the case (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2011), and that the production of redundant and over-informative referring expressions can fall in the set of behaviors that maximize efficient communication (Rubio-Fernandez, 2016;Degen et al., 2019). Moreover, considerations beyond informativeness affect speakers' naming choices, e.g. ...
... Finally, in our analyses we have made the simplified assumption that speakers want to provide the right amount of information, avoiding overinformative utterances. There is literature showing that this is not always the case (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2011), and that the production of redundant and over-informative referring expressions can fall in the set of behaviors that maximize efficient communication (Rubio-Fernandez, 2016;Degen et al., 2019). Moreover, considerations beyond informativeness affect speakers' naming choices, e.g. ...
Human lexicons contain many different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., "purple" or "magenta" for the same shade of color. On the one hand, studies on language use have explored how speakers adapt their referring expressions to successfully communicate in context, without focusing on properties of the lexical system. On the other hand, studies in language evolution have discussed how competing pressures for informativeness and simplicity shape lexical systems, without tackling in-context communication. We aim at bridging the gap between these traditions, and explore why a soft mapping between referents and words is a good solution for communication, by taking into account both in-context communication and the structure of the lexicon. We propose a simple measure of informativeness for words and lexical systems, grounded in a visual space, and analyze color naming data for English and Mandarin Chinese. We conclude that optimal lexical systems are those where multiple words can apply to the same referent, conveying different amounts of information. Such systems allow speakers to maximize communication accuracy and minimize the amount of information they convey when communicating about referents in contexts.
... The speaker (i.e., director) describes an object which the listener (i.e., matcher) subsequently has to select. In this scenario, speakers often produce redundant item descriptions, i.e., they overspecify items [4]. Figure 1 shows an example of a visual scene. ...
... This reasoning is well in line with Grice (1975) conversational maxims, according to which communication is effective if as much information as required is provided but redundancy is avoided. Thus, if people describe a person, they can be expected to rely on distinct attributes, whereas redundant ones will be neglected (Alves et al., 2022;Engelhardt et al., 2006). ...
According to the cognitive–ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons. Because distinct attributes tend to be negative, serial person descriptions should become increasingly negative. We found our predictions confirmed in six studies. In Study 1, descriptions of representatively sampled persons became increasingly distinct and negative with increasing serial positions of the target person. Study 2 eliminated this pattern of results by instructing perceivers to assimilate rather than differentiate a series of targets. Study 3 generalized the pattern from one-word descriptions of still photos of targets to multisentence descriptions of videos of targets. In line with the cognitive–ecological model, Studies 4–5b found that the relation between serial position and negativity was amplified among targets with similar positive attributes, zero among targets with distinct positive or negative attributes, and reversed among similar negative targets. Study 6 returned to representatively sampled targets and generalized the serial position–negativity effect from descriptions of the targets to overall evaluations of them. In sum, the present research provides strong evidence for the explanatory power of the cognitive–ecological model of social perception. We discuss theoretical and practical implications. It may pay off to appear early in an evaluation sequence.
... Occasionally, a conceptual error arises because the utterance does not aptly serve a communicative function. For instance, a speaker might accidentally say the star to refer to a small star without realizing the presence of another larger star, or say the small star when there is only one star (e.g., [10,11]). ...
Interpreting can be seen as a form of language production, where interpreters extract conceptual information from the source language and express it in the target language. Hence, like language production, interpreting contains speech errors at various (e.g., conceptual, syntactic, lexical and phonological) levels. The current study delved into the impact of language proficiency, working memory, and anxiety on the occurrence of speech errors across these linguistic strata during consecutive interpreting from English (a second language) into Chinese (a first language) by student interpreters. We showed that speech errors in general decreased as a function of the interpreter’s proficiency in the source (second) language and increased as a function of the interpreter’s anxiety. Conceptual errors, which result from mistaken comprehension of the source language, decreased as a function of language proficiency and working memory. Lexical errors increased as a function of the interpreter’s tendency of anxiety. Syntactic errors also decreased as a function of language proficiency and increased as a function of anxiety. Phonological errors were not sensitive to any of the three cognitive traits. We discussed implications for the cognitive processes underlying interpreting and for interpreting training.
... The use of 'me' and not 'I' is seen to be more exact and accurate in picturing the condition of the people during that time. The hidden metaphors indicate the pragmatics level of poem translation by showing the maxim of quantity (Engelhardt et al., 2006). In applying the maxim of quantity, translators' understanding is required to gather the intended meaning (Morini, 2013 In the next stanza, the word 'merayu' is translated into 'cries'. ...
This study examines the poem translation of 'Aku' by Chairil Anwar into 'Me' translated by Burton Raffel. 'Aku' was written in 1943, while the translation was done years later in 1970. Poetry translation can be a challenging yet exciting field to discuss. This study investigates the pragmatic level and the strategy used in translating the poem. While translating poetry, one must understand the implied and inferred meaning of the poet. Thus, the translation must also be able to provide the same image as the original. This study employed a descriptive-qualitative study and applied the analysis of Nida and Taber's (1974) translation strategy. The result shows that pragmatic devices such as context, speech act, and maxim can be used to understand better the context, tone, and theme of the poetry. The analyses of the strategy are also conveyed to get the inferred meaning of both the original poet and translator. The translator uses sense-for-sense translation to grasp the same image on the target text. Although the translated work's diction, rhyme, and metaphor are not as depth as the original work, the translated work's emotion and sense can still be felt as the original work.
... For example, when referring to the target object in Figure 2, many speakers say "the big red sofa" although either red or sofa is a superfluous property. This includes both experimental works (e.g., Pechmann (1989), Engelhardt, Bailey, and Ferreira (2006), Engelhardt, Demiral, and Ferreira (2011) and Koolen et al. (2011)), and computational work (e.g., Reiter (1995), van Gompel et al. (2019) and Degen, Hawkins, Graf, Kreiss, and Goodman (2020)). Perhaps the main question raised by these phenomena is whether speakers are "inefficient" because they cannot help themselves, or to help the reader understand the description (i.e., Bell (1984) and Coupland and Jaworski (2008)). ...
A prominent strand of work in formal semantics investigates the ways in which human languages quantify the elements of a set, as when we say All A are B, Few A are B, and so on. Building on a growing body of empirical studies that shed light on the meaning and the use of quantifiers, we extend this line of work by computationally modelling how human speakers textually describe complex scenes in which quantitative relations play an important role. To this end, we conduct a series of elicitation experiments in which human speakers were asked to perform a linguistic task that invites the use of quantified expressions. The experiments result in a corpus, called QTUNA, made up of short texts that contain a large variety of quantified expressions. We analyse QTUNA, summarise our findings, and explain how we design computational models of human quantifier use accordingly. Finally, we evaluate these models in accordance with QTUNA.
... Failures to offer as much information as is required can have deleterious consequences, as anyone trying to work with incomplete driving directions, poorly written recipes, or vague instructions for furniture assembly can attest. There is evidence that, in production, speakers avoid underinformative utterances (e.g., Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Katsos & Bishop, 2011;Katsos & Smith, 2009). Furthermore, comprehenders reject underinformative statements such as "Some dogs are mammals," even though these are technically true, at rates ranging from 60% (Noveck, 2001) to over 90% (Papafragou & Musolino, 2003; cf. also Bott & Noveck, 2004;Guasti et al., 2005). ...
Speaking with a foreign accent has often been thought to carry several disadvantages. Here, we probe a potential social advantage of non-native compared to native speakers using spoken utterances that either obey or violate the pragmatic principle of Informativeness. In Experiment 1, we show that listeners form different impressions of native and non-native speakers with identical pragmatic behavior: in a context in which omitting information could be deceptive, people rated underinformative speakers more negatively on trustworthiness and interpersonal appeal compared to informative speakers, but this tendency was mitigated for speakers with foreign accents. Furthermore, this mitigating effect was strongest for less proficient non-native speakers who were presumably not fully responsible for their linguistic choices. In Experiment 2, social lenience for non-native speakers emerged even in a non-deceptive context. Contrary to previous studies, there was no consistent global bias against non-native speakers in either experiment, despite their lower intelligibility. Thus the fact that non-native speakers have imperfect control of the linguistic signal affects pragmatic inferences and social evaluation in ways that can lead to surprising social benefits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... While the past work cited above demonstrates that children and adults are sensitive to the maxims of manner, quantity, and relation, other work has honed specifically on whether speakers and listeners tend to adhere to maxim of quantity during communicative exchanges. This line of work has had mixed findings with one study finding that adult speakers frequently over-describe targets in a referential communication task, and that listeners do not judge over-descriptions to be any worse than more concise descriptions of a target (Engelhardt et al., 2006). However, while listeners did not judge over-informative messages to be worse than concise ones, eye-tracking data suggested that over-informative messages led to momentary confusion. ...
Young children often provide insufficient information when speaking with others, making the ability to identify miscommunications and repair inadequate messages essential skills within their set of communicative abilities. Previous work has investigated children’s ability to detect and repair miscommunications in response to verbal cues from their listeners, but no work has explored their ability to do so in response to nonverbal cues from a listener. Study 1 assessed children’s ability to detect and repair miscommunications in response to nonverbal cues provided by a listener. Children (ages 4 to 6) provided a virtual child listener with instructions on how to find a prize. If the child provided a uniquely identifying message, the listener looked happy after presumably finding the prize. If the child provided an ambiguous message, the listener appeared sad after presumably failing to find the prize. Children demonstrated awareness, through ratings, as to whether or not the listener found the prize on each trial, based solely on her facial expression. Children were also more likely to attempt to repair their messages on trials where the listener appeared sad. With respect to individual differences, children with stronger executive functioning (as indexed by a latent variable) and emotion knowledge were more accurate in their ratings of communicative success. Children with stronger emotion knowledge were also more likely to attempt to repair their messages when the listener appeared sad. Overall, findings from Study 1 suggest that children are able to make use of nonverbal cues from a listener to detect and repair miscommunications. Findings also suggest that executive functioning and emotion knowledge support children’s ability to detect and repair miscommunications. Study 2 compared children’s ability to detect miscommunications and immediately repair their messages in response to different types of listener feedback. That is, children were provided with an opportunity to respond directly following the listener’s affective response (rather than after questions) and prior to the listener’s selection of prize location. After providing an ambiguous message, children (ages 4 to 6) were provided with feedback indicating the listener was confused. Children were more likely to attempt to repair their messages following verbal cues from the listener compared to a baseline condition (i.e., a listener pause). Notably, nonverbal feedback (i.e., a confused facial expression) was no better than the baseline condition at eliciting communication repair. The combination of verbal and nonverbal cues was also no more effective at eliciting communication repair than verbal cues alone. Interestingly, children frequently attempted to repair their messages in the baseline condition, which consisted only of a listener pause. When executive functioning components were examined individually, working memory was found to be associated with children’s likelihood of attempting to repair their messages, and with the quality of children’s repairs. Emotion knowledge was found to be associated with the quality of children’s repairs. The findings of Study 2 suggest that children are able to repair their messages in response to nonverbal feedback (given that they attempted to repair even in the baseline condition), but that they are more likely to repair their messages in response to verbal feedback. Findings also highlight the important role of executive functioning and emotion knowledge in children’s communication. Results from these two studies have theoretical implications for children’s communicative development, as well as implications for research methodology, the measurement of executive functioning, and interventions targeted to improve children’s communication skills.
... In the Easy condition, parents appeared less concerned about processing difficulty; even though modifiers were unnecessary to uniquely identify the referent (e.g., there was only one book in the display), parents did sometimes produce modifiers, and half of these were prenominal as compared to postnominal. This is interesting given that unnecessary modifiers increase processing load, even in adults (e.g., Engelhardt et al., 2006Engelhardt et al., , 2011 as well as in children (e.g., He et al., 2020). Based on these findings, for the current study, we predict that parents will use more postnominal modifiers in the Hard condition than the Easy condition. ...
Caregivers’ language input supports children’s language development, and it is often tuned to the child’s current level of skill. Evidence suggests that parental input is tuned to accommodate children’s expressive language levels, but accommodation to receptive language abilities is less understood. In particular, little is known about parental sensitivity to children’s abilities to process language in real time. Compared to nonspectrum children, children on the spectrum are slower to process language. In this study, we ask: Do parents of autistic children and those of nonspectrum children tune their language input to accommodate children’s different language processing abilities? Children with and without a diagnosis of autism (ages 2–6 years, N = 35) and their parents viewed a display of six images, one of which was the target. The parent labeled the target to direct the child’s attention to it. We first examined children’s language processing abilities by assessing their latencies to shift gaze to the labeled referent; from this, we found slower latencies in the autistic group than in the nonspectrum group, in line with previous findings. We then examined features of parents’ language and found that parents in both groups produced similar language, suggesting that parents may not adjust their language input according to children’s speed of language processing. This finding suggests that (1) capturing parental sensitivity to children’s receptive language, and specifically language processing, may enrich our models of individual differences in language input, and (2) future work should investigate if supporting caregivers in tuning their language use according to children’s language processing can improve children’s language outcomes.
... This means that the information shared must have the substance to clarify the details being conveyed. Innocent participants in conversational experiment were found to have a moderate level of attachment to the utilization of this maxim (Engelhardt, Bailey & Ferreira, 2006). In this manner, it manifests that a conversant needs to be more substantive on their responses to conversations. ...
Courtroom proceedings are the best way to extract all the needed and relevant information to give the vivid picture of the case. It gives the judge the profound knowledge in giving the final verdict. This forensic linguistics study employing textual analysis aimed to identify the different types of questions, types of responses and violations involving multiple cases. There were 30 Transcript Stenographer's Notes utilized where relative data and information were extracted. Courtroom proceedings used appropriate closed yes-no questions, appropriate closed specific questions, probing questions, open questions, and yes-no questions which were identified as appropriate types of courtroom questions. Conversely, unproductive or poor questions included multiple questions, opinion/statement questions, leading questions, misleading questions which are discouraged and objected to ask. Maxims of Manner, Quantity and Relevance were the types of responses observed by the witnesses. However, these maxims were also violated.
... This means that the information shared must have the substance to clarify the details being conveyed. Innocent participants in conversational experiment were found to have a moderate level of attachment to the utilization of this maxim (Engelhardt, Bailey & Ferreira, 2006). In this manner, it manifests that a conversant needs to be more substantive on their responses to conversations. ...
... The results of these L1 processing studies have been inconsistent. For example, regarding overspecification, while some studies, as mentioned above, have shown it can facilitate comprehension, some others (e.g., Engelhardt et al., 2006Engelhardt et al., , 2011Fukumura & van Gompel, 2017) have found that it impairs comprehension in some contexts. Concerning underspecification, results seem to suggest, surprisingly, that it has neither impairing nor facilitating effect on online language processing (Wu & Ma, 2020;Fukumura & van Gompel, 2017). ...
Via two reading experiments, this exploratory study examined the effects of over-and under-specified linguistic input on L2 online processing of Chinese referring expressions (REs). In each experiment, a group of advanced L2 Chinese speakers (all with Uyghurs as L1) and a control group of native Chinese speakers read 48 sets of 4 sentence pairs with each set including one sentence pair containing referential underspecification (ambiguity) and one pair containing overspecification (redundancy). An analysis of the two groups' reaction time (RT) using mixed-effects linear modelling reveals that underspecification had no effect on native Chinese speakers in both experiments, and overspecification also had no effect in the form of a redundant size noun modifier in Experiment 1 but showed a facilitating effect in the form of a color noun modifier in Experiment 2. In contrast, L2 Chinese speakers were significantly disrupted by underspecification in both experiments but not by overspecification. The results seem to support the hypothesis that L2 processing is constraint-based. Tentative research and pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.
... The results of these L1 processing studies have been inconsistent. For example, regarding overspecification, while some studies, as mentioned above, have shown it can facilitate comprehension, some others (e.g., Engelhardt et al., 2006Engelhardt et al., , 2011Fukumura & van Gompel, 2017) have found that it impairs comprehension in some contexts. Concerning underspecification, results seem to suggest, surprisingly, that it has neither impairing nor facilitating effect on online language processing (Wu & Ma, 2020;Fukumura & van Gompel, 2017). ...
Via two reading experiments, this exploratory study examined the effects of over-and under-specified linguistic input on L2 online processing of Chinese referring expressions (REs). In each experiment, a group of advanced L2 Chinese speakers (all with Uyghurs as L1) and a control group of native Chinese speakers read 48 sets of 4 sentence pairs with each set including one sentence pair containing referential underspecification (ambiguity) and one pair containing overspecification (redundancy). An analysis of the two groups’ reaction time (RT) using mixed-effects linear modelling reveals that underspecification had no effect on native Chinese speakers in both experiments, and overspecification also had no effect in the form of a redundant size noun modifier in Experiment 1 but showed a facilitating effect in the form of a color noun modifier in Experiment 2. In contrast, L2 Chinese speakers were significantly disrupted by underspecification in both experiments but not by overspecification. The results seem to support the hypothesis that L2 processing is constraint-based. Tentative research and pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.
... (b) Second, our earlier observation stands: at some early point in the conversation the derogatory generic content D = 'Germans are F ' isn't processed by the participants (even assuming that it was 10 Review of the debate: Davies and Arnold (2019). Further details: e.g., Rubio-Fernandez (2019), Engelhardt et al. (2006). 11 See Fox (2014). ...
According to nearly all theorists writing on the subject, a certain derogatory content is regularly and systematically communicated by slurs. So united, the theorists disagree sharply on the elements of this content, on its provenance, and on its mechanism. I argue that the basic premiss of all these views, that there is any such derogatory content conveyed with the use of slurs, is highly dubious.
... Quite notably, the rate at which these topic shifts occur is remarkably stable across the corpora (accounting for a mean 43% of subject anaphors, SD =8.2%), which Schiborr (2021: 397-409) explains in terms of an optimal information density of subject references: A discourse with too little differentiation among topics would not be worth telling (cf. Labov & Waletzky 1967;Engelhardt et al. 2006), whereas a discourse that switches topics too frequently would risk becoming incoherent. Of course, speakers do not mechanically switch topics every few clauses, and there may be local extrema in the rate of topic shifts, but over longer stretches of discourse, the ratesand consequently the proportion of lexical expressions -level out, regardless of language. ...
... Quite notably, the rate at which these topic shifts occur is remarkably stable across the corpora (accounting for a mean 43% of subject anaphors, SD =8.2%), which Schiborr (2021: 397-409) explains in terms of an optimal information density of subject references: A discourse with too little differentiation among topics would not be worth telling (cf. Labov & Waletzky 1967;Engelhardt et al. 2006), whereas a discourse that switches topics too frequently would risk becoming incoherent. Of course, speakers do not mechanically switch topics every few clauses, and there may be local extrema in the rate of topic shifts, but over longer stretches of discourse, the ratesand consequently the proportion of lexical expressions -level out, regardless of language. ...
Data from under-researched languages are now available in sufficient quantity and quality to feed into corpus-based approaches to language typology. In this paper we present Multi-CAST (Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts), a project designed to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison of naturalistic discourse across typologically diverse languages, which implements a purpose-built shared annotation scheme. After sketching the rationale and architecture of Multi-CAST, we illustrate the efficacy of the method with two case-studies: The first one investigates the rates of lexical (as opposed to pro-nominal and zero) realization of arguments in discourse across a sample of 15 typolo-gically diverse languages. Our results reveal a remarkable and hitherto unnoticed uniformity in the density of lexical references, despite the lack of content control in the corpora. The second addresses the question of whether cross-linguistically attested regularities in morphosyntax can meaningfully be related to frequency effects in discourse. We find some support for frequency-based explanations, but our data also show that the frequency accounts leave several key questions unanswered. Overall, our findings
underscore that research based on language documentation-derived corpus data, and
in particular spoken language data, is not only possible, but in fact crucially necessary
for testing frequency-based explanations, because these data stem from spoken language
and typologically diverse languages. We also identify a number of epistemological
and methodological shortcomings with our approach, and discuss some of the
requirements for further innovation in areas of corpus building, corpus annotation, and
typological comparability.
... On the other hand, overspecification is also frequent in natural language communication. Speakers usually use it when one of the properties of the target entity is salient but has no contrastive value (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2011;Rubio-Fernández, 2016). From the perspective of language comprehension, such a redundancy poses no serious problem, unless it creates an inconsistency that needs to be resolved. ...
The purpose of this Research Topic is to reflect and discuss links between neuroscience, psychology, computer science and robotics with regards to the topic of cross-modal learning which has, in recent years, emerged as a new area of interdisciplinary research. The term cross-modal learning refers to the synergistic synthesis of information from multiple sensory modalities such that the learning that occurs within any individual sensory modality can be enhanced with information from one or more other modalities. Cross-modal learning is a crucial component of adaptive behavior in a continuously changing world, and examples are ubiquitous, such as: learning to grasp and manipulate objects; learning to walk; learning to read and write; learning to understand language and its referents; etc. In all these examples, visual, auditory, somatosensory or other modalities have to be integrated, and learning must be cross-modal. In fact, the broad range of acquired human skills are cross-modal, and many of the most advanced human capabilities, such as those involved in social cognition, require learning from the richest combinations of cross-modal information. In contrast, even the very best systems in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics have taken only tiny steps in this direction. Building a system that composes a global perspective from multiple distinct sources, types of data, and sensory modalities is a grand challenge of AI, yet it is specific enough that it can be studied quite rigorously and in such detail that the prospect for deep insights into these mechanisms is quite plausible in the near term. Cross-modal learning is a broad, interdisciplinary topic that has not yet coalesced into a single, unified field. Instead, there are many separate fields, each tackling the concerns of cross-modal learning from its own perspective, with currently little overlap. We anticipate an accelerating trend towards integration of these areas and we intend to contribute to that integration. By focusing on cross-modal learning, the proposed Research Topic can bring together recent progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, psychology and neuroscience.
... A second challenge to this simple interpretation of the Gricean Maxim of Quantity is that speakers routinely violate it: while speakers are typically motivated to be sufficiently informative, they often produce overinformative expressions, particularly when using color words (e.g., referring to 'the red mug' in a context with a single mug in sight). In response to this puzzle, researchers have argued that people might produce overinformative expressions to preempt potential ambiguities that they are unaware of (Hawkins et al., 2021;Belke & Meyer, 2002;Fukumura & Carminati, 2021;Pechmann, 1989;Belke, 2006;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2013). For instance, people might choose to say 'the red mug', even when they see a single mug, in order to account for the possibility that there might be other mugs that they did not notice. ...
A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. Yet, people routinely produce redundant adjectives and their propensity to do so varies cross-linguistically. Here, we propose a computational theory, whereby speakers create referential expressions designed to facilitate listeners' reference resolution, as they process words in real time. We present a computational model of our account, the Incremental Collaborative Efficiency (ICE) model, which generates referential expressions by considering listeners' real-time incremental processing and reference identification. We apply the ICE framework to physical reference, showing that listeners construct expressions designed to minimize listeners' expected visual search effort during online language processing. Our model captures a number of known effects in the literature, including cross-linguistic differences in speakers' propensity to over-specify. Moreover, the ICE model predicts graded acceptability judgments with quantitative accuracy, systematically outperforming an alternative, brevity-based model. Our findings suggest that physical reference production is best understood as driven by a collaborative goal to help the listener identify the intended referent, rather than by an egocentric effort to minimize utterance length. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
... In line with models of mental state attribution and reference resolution (3,6,27,36), the probability that the speaker produces utterance u [p(u|t, b, r)] is obtained by assuming that the speaker is motivated to be as informative as possible (37) adjusted with the empirical finding that speakers often overspecify (38)(39)(40)(41). ...
Human social intelligence relies on our ability to infer other people's mental states such as their beliefs, desires, and intentions. While people are proficient at mental state inference from physical action, it is unknown whether people can make inferences of comparable granularity from simple linguistic events. Here, we show that people can make quantitative mental state attributions from simple referential expressions, replicating the fine-grained inferential structure characteristic of nonlinguistic theory of mind. Moreover, people quantitatively adjust these inferences after brief exposures to speaker-specific speech patterns. These judgments matched the predictions made by our computational model of theory of mind in language, but could not be explained by a simpler qualitative model that attributes mental states deductively. Our findings show how the connection between language and theory of mind runs deep, with their interaction showing in one of the most fundamental forms of human communication: reference.
... Third, norms govern conversations. For example, Gricean maxims posit that information provided in a conversation should aim to be informative and relevant (Berg, 1991;Engelhardt, Bailey, & Ferreira, 2006). In the case of modest non-disclosures, when asked about a relevant domain (e.g., work), individuals are not disclosing information that would provide a relevant and informative contribution to the conversation. ...
Modesty is regarded positively in social life, yet how it is evaluated by the person toward whom the modest behavior is directed and how it functions in close relationships has seldom been examined. In eleven studies, I examine how modest behavior can result in negative consequences in close relationships, possibly because modest behavior violates relational and conversational norms unique to close relationships. First, in Chapter 1, I provide an overview of how modesty is generally perceived, and how it may function differently and uniquely in the context of close relationships. In Chapter 2, I examine the perceptions of the actors who engage in modest behavior. In Studies 1 and 2ab, I find that modest individuals are less likely to disclose positive, personal news to their close friends when a relevant opportunity exists, out of a concern to not appear boastful. In Studies 3abc, I find that modest non-disclosure may be reflective of a latent individual difference. In Chapter 3, I examine the consequences of modest behavior on the recipients. In Studies 4 – 6, I find that this modest non-disclosure results in negative reactions on the part of the close friend if they later find out about the positive news through an external source, especially if they have high expectations of self-disclosure in close relationships. Critically, modest individuals misperceive this negative reaction; they tend to believe that their close friends would react more positively if they were to find out through means other than direct disclosure. In Studies 7ab, I find that individuals typically recognize that their friends may not disclose out of modesty concerns, but this realization does not attenuate the negative outcomes. Finally, in Chapter 4, I discuss why despite the generally positive perceptions of modesty, being modest with close friends can decrease trust and liking in close relationships.
... In accordance with the first maxim of quantity, several studies revealed that underspecification (giving too little information for a listener to identify a target) is a rare phenomenon, that only occurs in approximately 0.5-6% of referring expressions, depending on the experimental context (Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982;Koolen et al., 2011Koolen et al., , 2013Pechmann, 1989). However, there seems to be less evidence for the second maxim of quantity, because overspecification (giving more information than necessary) occurs in approximately 21-60% of referring expressions (Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982;Engelhardt et al., 2006;Koolen et al., 2011;Pechmann, 1984, as cited in Levelt, 1989;Pechmann, 1989), and in those cases, it does not even always contribute to a listener's identification of a target (Belke & Meyer, 2002;Pechmann, 1989). Given that overspecification clearly challenges Grice's second maxim of quantity, a better understanding of factors that cause overspecification would improve our understanding of factors involved in content selection. ...
Many studies have provided evidence for the influence of affect on cognitive processing. However, experimental investigations of the relationship between affect and speech production are scarce. This study explores whether a speaker’s affective state influences the production of referring expressions. In two experiments, affective states were elicited using film excerpts, after which speakers referred to target stimuli in a way that differentiated them from distractors. The affective states were opposites, either in terms of valence (happiness versus sadness) or approach-avoidance motivation (anger versus disgust). Affective conditions were then compared with respect to the frequency with which participants referred to a target’s affect, whether this affect was congruent with the speaker's affective state, the number of modifiers per expression, the ambiguity of referring expressions, and overspecification. Results revealed no differences between different affective states concerning these factors, suggesting that a speaker’s affective state does not influence the production of referring expressions.
... By self-disclosing greater degrees of personal information, a sender also provides a receiver with more information about the self (Derlega, Harris, and Chaikin 1973). In line with the quantity principle (Grice 1975), sparse provision of relevant task and personal information would make it difficult for the receiver to anticipate outcomes or distinguish among options, thus creating uncertainty (Engelhardt, Bailey, and Ferreira 2006). ...
The proliferating gig economy relies on online freelance marketplaces, which support relatively anonymous interactions by text-based messages. Informational asymmetries thus arise that can lead to exchange uncertainties between buyers and freelancers. Conventional marketing thought recommends reducing such uncertainty. However, uncertainty reduction and uncertainty management theories indicate that buyers and freelancers might benefit more from balancing, rather than reducing, uncertainty, such as by strategically adhering to or deviating from common communication principles. With dyadic analyses of calls for bids and bids from a leading online freelance marketplace, this study reveals that buyers attract more bids from freelancers when they provide moderate degrees of task information and concreteness, avoid sharing personal information, and limit the affective intensity of their communication. Freelancers’ bid success and price premiums increase when they mimic the degree of task information and affective intensity exhibited by buyers. However, mimicking a lack of personal information and concreteness reduces freelancers’ success, so freelancers should always be more concrete and offer more personal information than buyers do. These contingent perspectives offer insights into buyer–seller communication in two-sided online marketplaces; they clarify that despite, or sometimes due to, communication uncertainty, both sides can achieve success in the online gig economy.
... The RSA theory does not provide explicit limits or definitions as to when a speaker reasons about a listener, and for what linguistic phenomena or under which situational circumstances this reasoning would be too effortful. In fact, a common criticism of RSA (and Gricean pragmatics) is that it falls short in explaining speaker productions: utterances are sometimes longer than they need to be, underinformative or ambiguous (Engelhardt et al., 2006;Gatt et al., 2013;Baumann et al., 2014;McMahan and Stone, 2015), and speakers also sometimes fail to take listener perspective into account when generating referring expressions (Horton and Keysar, 1996;Lane and Ferreira, 2008;Yoon et al., 2012). ...
Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse connective production may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use.
Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental assumption that in order to understand intra-psychic cognitive processes one first has to understand the distributions of, and the biases built into, the environmental information that provides input to all cognitive processes. Both the biases and restriction, but also the assets and capacities, of the human mind often reflect, to a considerable degree, the irrational and rational features of the information environment and its manifestations in the literature, the Internet, and collective memory. Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making constitute a prime example of theory-driven research that promises to help behavioral scientists cope with the challenges of replicability and practical usefulness.
In anticipating upcoming content, comprehenders are known to rely on real-world knowledge. This knowledge can be deployed directly in favor of upcoming content about typical situations (implying a transparent mapping between the world and what speakers say about the world). Such knowledge can also be used to estimate the likelihood of speech, whereby atypical situations are the ones newsworthy enough to merit reporting (i.e., a nontransparent mapping in which improbable situations yield likely utterances). We report four forced-choice studies (three preregistered) testing this distinction between situation knowledge and speech production likelihood. Comprehenders are shown to anticipate situation-atypical meanings more when guessing content (a) that a speaker announces (rather than thinks), (b) that is said out of the blue (rather than produced when prompted), and (c) that is addressed to a large audience (rather than a single listener). The findings contrast with prior work that emphasizes a comprehension bias in favor of typicality, and they highlight the need for comprehension models that incorporate expectations for informativity (as one of a set of inferred speaker goals) alongside expectations for content plausibility.
Courtroom proceedings are the best way to extract all the needed and relevant information to give the vivid picture of the case. It gives the judge the profound knowledge in giving the final verdict. This forensic linguistics study employing textual analysis aimed to identify the different types of questions, types of responses and violations involving multiple cases. There were 30 Transcript Stenographer’s Notes utilized where relative data and information were extracted. Courtroom proceedings used appropriate closed yes-no questions, appropriate closed specific questions, probing questions, open questions, and yes-no questions which were identified as appropriate types of courtroom questions. Conversely, unproductive or poor questions included multiple questions, opinion/statement questions, leading questions, misleading questions which are discouraged and objected to ask. Maxims of Manner, Quantity and Relevance were the types of responses observed by the witnesses. However, these maxims were also violated.
This study sets out to investigate second language (L2) speakers’ derivation of pragmatic inferences and tolerance of violations of informativeness in two types of inferences, i.e., ad hoc implicatures and contrastive inference. The results of a graded judgment task revealed that pragmatic tolerance is inference-specific: L2 speakers were overly tolerant of underinformative statements in ad hoc implicatures than in contrastive inference. In addition, L2 speakers were found to be more relaxed with overinformativeness than underinformativeness in contrastive inference. The fact that L2 speakers tend to be redundant (overinformative) than ambiguous (underinformative) is further discussed with the Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis ( Lozano, 2016 ). This study hopes to contribute to a more find-grained understanding of L2 speakers’ abilities of deriving pragmatic inferences.
Most theories of pragmatics and language processing predict that speakers avoid excessive informational redundancy. Informationally redundant utterances are, however, quite common in natural dialogue. From a comprehension standpoint, it remains unclear how comprehenders interpret these utterances, and whether they make attempts to reconcile the ‘dips’ in informational utility with expectations of ‘appropriate’ or ‘rational’ speaker informativity. We show that informationally redundant (overinformative) utterances can trigger pragmatic inferences that increase utterance utility in line with comprehender expectations. In a series of three studies, we look at utterances which refer to stereotyped event sequences describing common activities (scripts). When comprehenders encounter utterances describing events that can be easily inferred from prior context, they interpret them as signifying that the event conveys new, unstated information (i.e. an event otherwise assumed to be habitual, such as paying the cashier when shopping, is reinterpreted as non-habitual). We call these inferences atypicality inferences. Further, we show that the degree to which these atypicality inferences are triggered depends on the framing of the utterance. In the absence of an exclamation mark or a discourse marker indicating the speaker's specific intent to communicate the given information, such inferences are far less likely to arise. Overall, the results demonstrate that excessive conceptual redundancy leads to comprehenders revising the conversational common ground, in an effort to accommodate unexpected dips in informational utility.
We investigate the extent to which pragmatic versus conceptual factors can affect a speaker's decision to mention or omit different components of an event. In the two experiments, we demonstrate the special role of pragmatic factors related to audience design in speakers' decisions to mention conceptually "peripheral" event components, such as sources (i.e., starting points) in source-goal motion events (e.g., a baby crawling from a crib to a toybox). In particular, we found that pragmatic factors related to audience design could not only drive the decision to omit sources from mention, but could also motivate speakers to mention sources more often than needed. By contrast, speaker's decisions to talk about goals did not appear to be fundamentally driven by pragmatic factors in communication. We also manipulated the animacy of the figure in motion and found that participants in our studies treated both animate and inanimate source-goal motion events in the same way, both linguistically and in memory. We discuss the implications of our work for message generation across different communicative contexts and for future work on the topic of audience design.
Across many languages, pronouns are the most frequently produced referring expressions. We examined whether and how speakers avoid referential ambiguity that arises when the gender of a pronoun is compatible with more than one entity in the context in French. Experiment 1 showed that speakers use fewer pronouns when human referents have the same gender than when they had different genders, but grammatical gender congruence between inanimate referents did not result in fewer pronouns. Experiment 2 showed that semantic similarity between non-human referents can enhance the likelihood that speakers avoid grammatical-gender ambiguous pronouns. Experiment 3 pitched grammatical gender ambiguity avoidance against the referents' competition in the non-linguistic context, showing that when speakers can base their pronoun choice on non-linguistic competition, they ignore the pronoun's grammatical gender ambiguity even when the referents are semantically related. The results thus indicated that speakers preferentially produce referring expressions based on non-linguistic information; they are more likely to be affected by the referents' non-linguistic similarity than by the linguistic ambiguity of a pronoun.
In acquiring a native language, the input children receive, to an unneglectable extent, shapes the rate of acquisition and the ultimate achievement. This in turn has cascading effects on many aspects of later development, including but not limited to language. Providing optimal input for early language development, therefore, is of major interest to scientists, parents, and educators. This thought paper highlights two less-discussed factors in the formula of optimal input—the balance between input quantity and quality, and the timing of input provision. Correspondingly, two points are made: first, given significant limitations in processing abilities in early development, increased quality is sometimes achieved via decreased quantity; second, endowed with a sleep-mediated memory consolidation system, input provision should consider “sleep” as a reference point in timing. Both points boil down to a central theme that nurture (i.e., input) should be tailored to suit nature; in particular, optimal input should take best advantage of the endowments provided by our nature (e.g., sleep to consolidate memory) and to circumvent the limitations set by nature (e.g., processing limitations).
Humans and animals make inferences about the world under limited time and knowledge. In contrast, many models of rational inference treat the mind as a Laplacean Demon, equipped with unlimited time, knowledge, and computational might. Following Herbert Simon's notion of satisficing, this chapter proposes a family of algorithms based on a simple psychological mechanism: one-reason decision making. These fast-and-frugal algorithms violate fundamental tenets of classical rationality: It neither looks up nor integrates all information. By computer simulation, a competition was held between the satisficing "take-the-best" algorithm and various "rational" inference procedures (e.g., multiple regression). The take-the-best algorithm matched or outperformed all competitors in inferential speed and accuracy. This result is an existence proof that cognitive mechanisms capable of successful performance in the real world do not need to satisfy the classical norms of rational inference.
Current theories of parsing suggest a wide variety of mechanisms by which modifiers, such as relative clauses, may be related to constituents that offer more than one potential attachment site. Some, like the tuning hypothesis, are based on the premise that people's parsing performance is shaped by prior exposure to language. Others (e.g. garden-path theory and construal theory) play down any potential role of past linguistic experience, stressing instead the varying influences of structural characteristics of the sentence in question. The two views encourage differing expectations about cross-linguistic variation in parsing preference. A questionnaire study and two on-line experiments were carried out to investigate attachment preferences in Dutch. The results pose a number of problems for the majority of the existing parsing models and are clearly inconsistent with some of the traditional theories. In contrast, the findings are compatible with models incorporating parsing mechanisms that are tuned by language experience. The results highlight the need for further corpus studies to subject these accounts to more searching scrutiny.
Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.
Humans and animals make inferences about the world under limited time and knowledge. In con-
trast, many models of rational inference treat the mind as a Laplacean Demon, equipped with un-
limited time, knowledge, and computational might. Following H. Simon's notion of satisficing, the
authors have proposed a family of algorithms based on a simple psychological mechanism: one-
reason decision making. These fast and frugal algorithms violate fundamental tenets of classical
rationality: They neither look up nor integrate all information. By computer simulation, the authors
held a competition between the satisficing "Take The Best" algorithm and various "rational" infer-
ence procedures (e.g., multiple regression). The Take The Best algorithm matched or outperformed
all competitors in inferential speed and accuracy. This result is an existence proof that cognitive
mechanisms capable of successful performance in the real world do not need to satisfy the classical
norms of rational inference.
In three experiments, a referential communication task was used to determine the conditions under which speakers produce and listeners use prosodic cues to distinguish alternative meanings of a syntactically ambiguous phrase. Analyses of the actions and utterances from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that Speakers chose to produce effective prosodic cues to disambiguation only when the referential scene provided support for both interpretations of the phrase. In Experiment 3, on-line measures of parsing commitments were obtained by recording the Listener’s eye movements to objects as the Speaker gave the instructions. Results supported the previous experiments but also showed that the Speaker’s prosody affected the Listener’s interpretation prior to the onset of the ambiguous phrase, thus demonstrating that prosodic cues not only influence initial parsing but can also be used to predict material which has yet to be spoken. The findings suggest that informative prosodic cues depend upon speakers’ knowledge of the situation: speakers provide prosodic cues when needed; listeners use these prosodic cues when present.
The hypothesis that readers use verb argument structure information to generate and evaluate likely syntactic alternatives and assign provisional interpretations was evaluated using wh-questions. such as Which client did the salesman visit while in the city? Using a word by word, self-paced reading task with a "makes sense" judgment, we manipulated the plausibility of the wh-phrase with respect to the semantic role that it would play if it were the direct object. We also manipulated the preferred argument structure of the verb, using (1) transitive verbs that typically occur with only a direct object; (2) objective control verbs that typically are used with both a direct object and an infinitive complement; and (3) dative verbs that are typically used with both a direct object and an indirect object. The results showed clear and immediate effects of argument structure. Sentences with implausible wh-phrases were judged to stop making sense at the verb for simple transitive verbs. However, sentences with object control verbs and dative verbs were judged to make sense as long as the wh-phrase could be plausibly interpreted as one of the verb′s arguments. Thus, the bias to initially interpret a wh-phrase as the direct object of a verb was blocked when the filler was implausible in the direct object role if the verb provided another argument position. In addition, interpretation of the wh-phrase began at the verb, prior to the gap, even when the syntactic position of the gap was ambiguous. The results are taken as support for constraint-based lexicalist models of processing.
Thesis - University of Connecticut. Photocopy.
Presents an argument in 3 parts. 1st, it is shown by reference to the role of semantics in a transformational grammar that semantic decisions are not determined by either syntactic or semantic selection restrictions but by the speaker's knowledge of the intended referent. 2nd, it is shown that current theories of word-referent relations are inadequate to specify the grounds for the above-mentioned semantic decisions. Finally, by the use of a paradigm case, a theory of reference in terms of a cognitive theory of semantics is advanced in which it is shown that a semantic decision, i.e., the choice of a word, is made so as to differentiate an intended referent from some perceived or inferred set of alternatives. The implications include an altered conception of meaning, a statement of the relative information in words and in pictures, a hypothesis about the redundancy of the postulation of deep structure, and revised conception of the relation between language and thought. (46 ref.)
Psycholinguists have commonly assumed that as a spoken linguistic message unfolds over time, it is initially structured by
a syntactic processing module that is encapsulated from information provided by other perceptual and cognitive systems. To
test the effects of relevant visual context on the rapid mental processes that accompany spoken language comprehension, eye
movements were recorded with a head-mounted eye-tracking system while subjects followed instructions to manipulate real objects.
Visual context influenced spoken word recognition and mediated syntactic processing, even during the earliest moments of language
processing.
Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.
Sentences with temporarily ambiguous reduced relative clauses (e.g., The actress selected by the director believed that...) were preceded by discourse contexts biasing a main clause or a relative clause. Eye movements in the disambiguating region (by the director) revealed that, in the relative clause biasing contexts, ambiguous reduced relatives were no more difficult to process than unambiguous reduced relatives or full (unreduced) relatives. Regression analyses demonstrated that the effects of discourse context at the point of ambiguity (e.g., selected) interacted with the past participle frequency of the ambiguous verb. Reading times were modeled using a constraint-based competition framework in which multiple constraints are immediately integrated during parsing and interpretation. Simulations suggested that this framework reconciles the superficially conflicting results in the literature on referential context effects on syntactic ambiguity resolution.
A great deal of psycholinguistic research has focused on the question of how adults interpret language in real time. This work has revealed a complex and interactive language processing system capable of rapidly coordinating linguistic properties of the message with information from the context or situation (e.g. Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Britt, 1994; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1991). In the study of language acquisition, however, surprisingly little is known about how children process language in real time and whether they coordinate multiple sources of information during interpretation. The lack of child research is due in part to the fact that most existing techniques for studying language processing have relied upon the skill of reading, an ability that young children do not have or are only beginning to acquire. We present here results from a new method for studying children's moment-by-moment language processing abilities, in which a head-mounted eye-tracking system was used to monitor eye movements as participants responded to spoken instructions. The results revealed systematic differences in how children and adults process spoken language: Five Year Olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities, and showed little or no ability to revise initial parsing commitments. Adults showed sensitivity to these discourse constraints at the earliest possible stages of processing, and were capable of revising incorrect parsing commitments. Implications for current models of sentence processing are discussed.
Characterizing the relationship between form-based linguistic knowledge and representation of context has long been of importance in the study of on-line language processing. Recent experimental research has shown evidence of very rapid effects of referential context in resolving local indeterminacies on-line. However, there has been no consensus regarding the nature of these context effects. The current paper summarizes recent work covering a range of phenomena for which referential contrast has been shown to influence on-line processing, including prenominal and post-nominal modification, focus operators, and intonational focus. The results of the body of work suggest that referential context effects are not limited to situations in which the linguistic form of the utterance directly specifies the point of contact with context. Rather, context effects of a pragmatic, Gricean nature appear to be possible, suggesting the relationship between linguistic form and context in rapid on-line processing can be of a very indirect nature.
As a potential alternative to standard null hypothesis significance testing, we describe methods for graphical presentation of data--particularly condition means and their corresponding confidence intervals--for a wide range of factorial designs used in experimental psychology. We describe and illustrate confidence intervals specifically appropriate for between-subject versus within-subject factors. For designs involving more than two levels of a factor, we describe the use of contrasts for graphical illustration of theoretically meaningful components of main effects and interactions. These graphical techniques lend themselves to a natural and straightforward assessment of statistical power.
Ferreira and Clifton (1986, Experiment 1) found that readers experienced equal difficulty with temporarily ambiguous reduced relatives clauses when the first noun was animate (e.g., "The defendant examined by the lawyer was . . .") and when it was inanimate and thus an unlikely Agent (e.g., "The evidence examined . . ."). This data pattern suggested that a verb′s semantic constraints do not affect initial syntactic ambiguity resolution. We repeated the experiment using: (1) inanimate noun/verb combinations that did not easily permit a main clause continuation, (2) a baseline condition with morphologically unambiguous verbs (e.g., "stolen"), (3) a homogeneous set of disambiguating prepositional phrases, and (4) a display in which all of the critical regions were presented on the same line of text. In two eye-movement experiments, animacy had immediate effects on ambiguity resolution: only animate nouns showed clear signs of difficulty. Post-hoc regression analyses revealed that what little processing difficulty readers had with the inanimate nouns varied with the semantic fit of individual noun/verb combinations: items with strong semantic fit showed no processing difficulty compared to unambiguous controls, whereas items with weak semantic fit showed a pattern of processing difficulty which was similar to Ferreira and Clifton (1986). The results are interpreted within the framework of an evidential (constraint-based) approach to ambiguity resolution. Analyses of reading times also suggested that the millisecond per character correction for region length is problematic, especially for small scoring regions. An alternative transformation is suggested.
The goal of much psycholinguistic research is to understand the processes by which linguistic input is mapped onto a hearer's mental representation of his or her world. Within the context of a sentence such as "The mouse chased the cat into the basket," we can ask questions such as "At what stage is the cat interpreted as the thing being chased?" "At what stage do we determine which cat?" and, more generally, "How, and when, do we map the components of a sentence onto components of the world?" Historically, there has been somewhat of a shift in respect of the answer to these questions. In the 1960s, "click-detection" studies suggested the possibility that interpretation may be bounded by clausal structure, with clause boundaries being the site of significant processing effort; in the 1980s, researchers proposed that interpretation does not "lag" behind syntactic parsing, but takes place incrementally, as each word is encountered; and more recently, it has been demonstrated that interpretation can on occasion be driven by expectations made on the basis of linguistic input that precedes the actual linguistic items that confirm those expectations. In this chapter, we review a number of these latter studies. Specifically, we explore the timing of interpretive processes in relation to the mapping of language onto a concurrent visual world. We shall review first a series of studies that explore the mapping of I/I/ sentences onto the visual world and that show that the processor is able to anticipate what is likely to be referred to next. We then review a series of studies that show how, in fact, the mapping is not onto the visual world but rather onto a mental world; this is shown by exploring patterns of eye movements when the visual world is absent at the time of the linguistic input, and, in other studies, when the visual world remains constant, but certain "facts" about that world are changed in the linguistic context that precedes the target sentence . Finally, we review a study that delves a little deeper into the relationship between linguistic structure and the structure of events that are portrayed in the visual world. We shall conclude in the final section that the interpretation of a sentence situated in a visual world may be as much to do with non-linguistic, primarily visually driven, processes as with linguistic processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Eye movements to pictures of four objects on a screen were monitored as participants followed a spoken instruction to move one of the objects, e.g., “Pick up the beaker; now put it below the diamond” (Experiment 1) or heard progressively larger gates and tried to identify the referent (Experiment 2). The distractor objects included a cohort competitor with a name that began with the same onset and vowel as the name of the target object (e.g.,beetle), a rhyme competitor (e.g.speaker), and an unrelated competitor (e.g.,carriage). In Experiment 1, there was clear evidence for both cohort and rhyme activation as predicted by continuous mapping models such as TRACE (McClelland and Elman, 1986) and Shortlist (Norris, 1994). Additionally, the time course and probabilities of eye movements closely corresponded to response probabilities derived from TRACE simulations using the Luce choice rule (Luce, 1959). In the gating task, which emphasizes word-initial information, there was clear evidence for multiple activation of cohort members, as measured by judgments and eye movements, but no suggestion of rhyme effects. Given that the same sets of pictures were present during the gating task as in Experiment 1, we conclude that the rhyme effects in Experiment 1 were not an artifact of using a small set of visible alternatives.
We discuss theories of sentence parsing, paying particular attention to claims about how context may affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities. We defend the garden-path theory, arguing that it accounts for a wide range of data that other theories do not account for. The theory proposed by Crain, Altmann, and Steedman is taken as the most attractive alternative, but we argue that its underlying semantic claims are questionable, and we suggest that the data that have been presented in its support are not inconsistent with the garden-path theory.
When listeners follow spoken instructions to manipulate real objects, their eye movements to the objects are closely time locked to the referring words. We review five experiments showing that this time-locked characteristic of eye movements provides a detailed profile of the processes that underlie real-time spoken language comprehension. Together, the first four experiments showed that listerners immediately integrated lexical, sublexical, and prosodic information in the spoken input with information from the visual context to reduce the set of referents to the intended one. The fifth experiment demonstrated that a visual referential context affected the initial structuring of the linguistic input, eliminating even strong syntactic preferences that result in clear garden paths when the referential context is introduced linguistically. We argue that context affected the earliest moments of language processing because it was highly accessible and relevant to the behavioral goals of the listener.
Three experiments investigated whether speakers use constituent ordering as a mechanism for avoiding ambiguities. In utterances like “Jane showed the letter to Mary to her mother,” alternate orders would avoid the temporary PP-attachment ambiguity (“Jane showed her mother the letter to Mary,” or “Jane showed to her mother the letter to Mary”). A preference judgment experiment confirmed that comprehenders prefer the latter orders for dative utterances when the former order would have contained an ambiguity. Nevertheless, speakers in two on-line production experiments showed no evidence of an ambiguity avoidance strategy. In fact, they were slightly more likely to use the former order when it was ambiguous than when it was not. Speakers’ failure to disambiguate with ordering cannot be explained by the use of other ambiguity mechanisms, like prosody. A prosodic analysis of the responses in Experiment 3 showed that while speakers generally produced prosodic patterns that were consistent with the syntactic structure, these patterns would not strongly disambiguate the PP-attachment ambiguity. We suggest that speakers do not consistently disambiguate local PP-attachment ambiguities of this type, and in particular do not use constituent ordering for this purpose. Instead, constituent ordering is driven by factors like syntactic weight and lexical bias, which may be internal to the production system.
While much work has been done investigating the role of context in the incremental processing of syntactic indeterminacies, relatively little is known about online semantic interpretation. The experiments in this article made use of the eye-tracking paradigm with spoken language and visual contexts in order to examine how, and when listeners make use of contextually-defined contrast in interpreting simple prenominal adjectives. Experiment 1 focused on intersective adjectives. Experiment 1A provided further evidence that intersective adjectives are processed incrementally. Experiment 1B compared response times to follow instructions such as ‘Pick up the blue comb ’ under conditions where there were two blue objects (e.g. a blue pen and a blue comb), but only one of these objects had a contrasting member in the display. Responses were faster to objects with a contrasting member, establishing that the listeners initially assume a contrastive interpretation for intersective adjectives. Experiments 2 and 3 focused on vague scalar adjectives examining the time course with which listeners establish contrast for scalar adjectives such as tall using information provided by the head noun (e.g. glass) and information provided by the visual context. Use of head-based information was
Eye movements were recorded as subjects read sentences containing temporary structural ambiguities. In accord with the garden-path theory of sentence comprehension, shorter reading times were found for sentences conforming to certain independently motivated parsing strategies (late closure and minimal attachment) than for comparable sentences which violate these strategies. Further, longer fixation durations were associated with the very first fixation in the region of the sentence which disambiguated the sentence, suggesting that the human sentence-parsing mechanism operates in a rather systematic fashion, immediately computing the structural consequences of fixated material for the analysis of preceding material. The pattern of regressive eye movements did not conform to the view that the parsing mechanism automatically returns to the beginning of the sentence to revise an incorrect analysis of linguistic material nor did it support the view that the parsing mechanism systematically backtracks through the sentence until the source of the erroneous analysis is located. Rather, the pattern of regressions indicated that the parsing mechanism typically engages in selective reanalysis, exploiting whatever information it has available about the type of error it has committed to guide its reanalysis attempts. Finally, it is emphasized that an understanding of the parser's revision procedures is essential to an explanation of why certain linguistic structures cannot be successfully parsed by humans.
Three experiments addressed the question whether semantic content or pragmatic context can direct the initial syntactic analysis assigned to sentences. Each experiment determined whether syntactic processing biases that have been observed in sentences presented in isolation can be overcome. In two experiments that measured eye movements, we found that the syntactic processing biases remained even when they resulted in thematically based anomaly or when they conflicted with discourse biases. In a third experiment, we used a self-paced reading task to replicate some of the results obtained using eye movement measures. We argue that the data support the existence of a syntactic processing module.
How does a parser, a device that imposes an analysis on a string of symbols so that they can be interpreted, work? More specifically, how does the parser in the human cognitive mechanism operate? Using a wide range of empirical data concerning human natural language processing, Bradley Pritchett demonstrates that parsing performance depends on grammatical competence, not, as many have thought, on perception, computation, or semantics. Pritchett critiques the major performance-based parsing models to argue that the principles of grammar drive the parser; the parser, furthermore, is the apparatus that tries to enforce the conditions of the grammar at every point in the processing of a sentence. In comparing garden path phenomena, those instances when the parser fails on the first reading of a sentence and must reanalyze it, with occasions when the parser successfully functions the first time around, Pritchett makes a convincing case for a grammar-derived parsing theory.
When we think of the ways we use language, we think of face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, reading and writing, and even talking to oneself. These are arenas of language useâtheaters of action in which people do things with language. But what exactly are they doing with language? What are their goals and intentions? By what processes do they achieve these goals? In these twelve essays, Herbert H. Clark and his colleagues discuss the collective nature of languageâthe ways in which people coordinate with each other to determine the meaning of what they say. According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a "common ground" of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this "common ground" from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. Clark also discusses the means by which speakers design their utterances for particular audiences and coordinate their use of language with other participants in a language arena. He argues that language use in conversation is a collaborative process, where speaker and listener work together to establish that the listener understands the speaker's meaning. Since people often use words to mean something quite different from the dictionary definitions of those words, Clark offers a realistic perspective on how speakers and listeners coordinate on the meanings of words. This collection presents outstanding examples of Clark's pioneering work on the pragmatics of language use and it will interest psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, and philosophers.
Psychological theories of natural language processing have usually assumed that the sentence processor resolves local syntactic ambiguities by selecting a single analysis on the basis of structural criteria such as Frazier's (1978) "minimal attachment." According to such theories, alternative analyses will only be attempted if the initial analysis subsequently proves inconsistent with the context. (See also Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Ford, Bresnan, & Kaplan, 1982; Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983). An alternative hypothesis exists, however: If sentences are understood incrementally, more or less word-by-word (Marlsen-Wilson, 1973, 1975), then syntactic processing can in principle exploit the fact that interpretations are available, using them "interactively" to select among alternative syntactic analyses on the basis of their plausibility with respect to the context. The present paper considers possible architectures for such incremental and interactive sentence processors, and argues for an architecture.
The present study examines whether a deficit in the production of definite descriptions can be compensated for and successfully resolved in social interaction. We first discuss the developmental reasons for contextually inadequate descriptions and also the mechanisms by which social interaction can reduce processing demands. Then we report on a cross-sectional study using 50 Dutch subjects aged 3, 6, and 9, compared to adults, in which we analyzed the interaction between speaker and addressee in a referential communication task. Our results reveal that all the referential ambiguities in the 6 and 9 year olds, and in the adults, were successfully resolved when the addressee repeated the preceding description in question format, where the initial description (plus the succeeding specification) had not been explicit enough to identify the target referent. In the youngest age group, the 3 year olds, the analogous percentage of resolutions was 89%. Moreover, we found that the length of interaction required depends on age-related differences in the explicitness of the initial descriptions and the (induced) repairs. The main results raise several questions that are discussed under three headings: the role of feedback in speaker-addressee interaction, the possibility of a procedural explanation for production deficits and their compensation, and the possible learning mechanisms underlying developmental changes in referential descriptions.
Speakers only sometimes include the that in sentence complement structures like The coach knew (that) you missed practice. Six experiments tested the predictions concerning optional word mention of two general approaches to language production. One approach claims that language production processes choose syntactic structures that ease the task of creating sentences, so that words are spoken opportunistically, as they are selected for production. The second approach claims that a syntactic structure is chosen that is easiest to comprehend, so that optional words like that are used to avoid temporarily ambiguous, difficult-to-comprehend sentences. In all experiments, speakers did not consistently include optional words to circumvent a temporary ambiguity, but they did omit optional words (the complementizer that) when subsequent material was either repeated (within a sentence) or prompted with a recall cue. The results suggest that speakers choose syntactic structures to permit early mention of available material and not to circumvent disruptive temporary ambiguities.
When participants follow spoken instructions to pick up and move objects in a visual workspace, their eye movements to the objects are closely time-locked to referential expressions in the instructions. Two experiments used this methodology to investigate the processing of the temporary ambiguities that arise because spoken language unfolds over time. Experiment 1 examined the processing of sentences with a temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., "Put the apple on the towel in the box") using visual contexts that supported either the normally preferred initial interpretation (the apple should be put on the towel) or the less-preferred interpretation (the apple is already on the towel and should be put in the box). Eye movement patterns clearly established that the initial interpretation of the ambiguous phrase was the one consistent with the context. Experiment 2 replicated these results using prerecorded digitized speech to eliminate any possibility of prosodic differences across conditions or experimenter demand. Overall, the findings are consistent with a broad theoretical framework in which real-time language comprehension immediately takes into account a rich array of relevant nonlinguistic context.
Three experiments assessed how speakers avoid linguistically and nonlinguistically ambiguous expressions. Speakers described target objects (a flying mammal, bat) in contexts including foil objects that caused linguistic (a baseball bat) and nonlinguistic (a larger flying mammal) ambiguity. Speakers sometimes avoided linguistic-ambiguity, and they did so equally regardless of whether they also were about to describe foils. This suggests that comprehension processes can sometimes detect linguistic-ambiguity before producing it. However, once produced, speakers consistently avoided using the same linguistically ambiguous expression again for a different meaning. This suggests that production processes can successfully detect linguistic-ambiguity after-the-fact. Speakers almost always avoided nonlinguistic-ambiguity. Thus, production processes are especially sensitive to nonlinguistic- but not linguistic-ambiguity, with the latter avoided consistently only once it is already articulated.
The study reported here was conducted in the Algonquian language of Odawa (a.k.a. Ottawa), with the goal of gaining new insight into the ways that conceptual accessibility affects human sentence production. The linguistic characteristics of Odawa are quite different from those found in the languages most often examined by psycholinguists. The data obtained from the sentence production experiment reported here are thus relevant to production in a heretofore unexamined language. Moreover, the data inform broader theoretical issues, such as the extent to which sentence production can be considered as an incremental process, and the interaction of the various factors affecting conceptual accessibility. In addition, the study stands as evidence that experimental psycholinguistic research can and should be carried out in typologically diverse languages.
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