Gregory L. Murphy’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

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Publications (3)

Audience Design in Meaning and Reference
  • Chapter

December 1982

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116 Reads

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409 Citations

Herbert H. Clark

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Gregory L. Murphy

We argue that the speaker designs each utterance for specific listeners, and they, in turn, make essential use of this fact in understanding that utterance. We call this property of utterances audience design. Often listeners can come to a unique interpretation for an utterance only if they assume that the speaker designed it just so that they could come to that interpretation uniquely. We illustrate reasoning from audience design in the understanding of definite reference, anaphora, and word meaning, and we offer evidence that listeners actually reason this way. We conclude that audience design must play a central role in any adequate theory of understanding.

Basic-level superiority in picture categorization

February 1982

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46 Reads

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273 Citations

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Gregory L. Murphy

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Edward E. Smith

In a seminal paper, E. Rosch, C. B. Mervis, W. D. Gray, D. M. Johnson, and P. Boyes-Braem (Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 382–439) found that an object can be categorized faster at the basic level (e.g., hammer) than at either a subordinate (club hammer) or a superordinate level (tool); they attributed this result to basic categories having more distinctive attributes. But numerous factors other than the number of distinctive attributes might have caused this result; for example, basic categories routinely have shorter and more frequent names than do subordinates, and are typically learned earlier and occur more often than either subordinate or superordinate categories. In this paper, we report three experiments, all of which used artificial subordinate, basic, and superordinate categories, and all of which either held constant or systematically varied several of these “other” factors. All three studies replicated the finding that objects can be categorized fastest at the basic level (but the relative speeds of subordinate and superordinate categorizations differed from past results); and all three strongly supported the claim that distinctive attributes are the factor underlying the results, though it appears that only perceptual attributes are critical.

Citations (3)

... In some cases, this involves the speaker putting extra individual effort into message planning in order to facilitate their partner's comprehension (Clark & Brennan, 1991;Clark & Schaefer, 1989;Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986;Schober, 1995). In other words, the speakers try to increase the efficacy of the conversation and to reduce the collaborative effort by producing messages that are designed and adapted to their addressee, even if doing so involves increased individual effort, a mechanism called audience design (Clark & Murphy, 1982;Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986;Fussell & Krauss, 1989;Gann & Barr, 2014;Harris et al., 1980;Nückles et al., 2006;Turner & Knutsen, 2021). Consider these two messages during a conversation between friends planning a meeting: ...

Reference:

Direct and indirect linguistic measures of common ground in dialogue studies involving a matching task: A systematic review
La visée vers l'auditoire dans la signification et la référence
  • Citing Article

  • January 1982

Bulletin de psychologie

Herbert H. Clark

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Gregory L. Murphy

... One possibility is that prosody carries information that is recoverable from long-term past context, but not from short-term past context (see Hypothesis 1 below). Such long-term linguistic information may be challenging for listeners to maintain during real-time communication due to limited human cognitive capacities (e.g., working memory; Gibson, 1998;Lewis et al., 2006;Futrell et al., 2020) and prosody may therefore be used by speakers from an audience-design perspective 2 (Clark and Murphy, 1982). For instance, it might be possi-ble to infer which word is most important in the current sentence given long-term linguistic context, but speakers still choose to emphasize the most important word using prosody to help the listener access this information more easily. ...

Reference:

The time scale of redundancy between prosody and linguistic context
Audience Design in Meaning and Reference
  • Citing Chapter

  • December 1982

Herbert H. Clark

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Gregory L. Murphy

... 5). Therefore, the authors capitalize on the preference to name pictures with the basic label, the so-called basic-level superiority effect (Murphy & Smith, 1982;Rosch et al., 1976) and aim at observing whether this tendency is adaptively modified according to the choices made by a task partner, in this case an artificial agent. However, such basic-level preference can be attenuated or reversed by variables such as lexical frequency, age of acquisition, name agreement and individual familiarity with the referents (Tanaka & Taylor, 1991;Vitkovitch & Tyrrell, 1995), effects that have been observed also in tasks of visual search for typical category tokens (Maxfield et al., 2014). ...

Reference:

Linguistic alignment with an artificial agent: A commentary and re-analysis
Basic-level superiority in picture categorization
  • Citing Article

  • February 1982

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Gregory L. Murphy

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Edward E. Smith