Probabilistic weighting of perspectives in dyadic communication

In successful communication, speakers tailor their language tothe context and listeners make inferences about the speaker’sknowledge. Several current accounts propose that both speak-ers and listeners accomplish this by rational analysis of thestatistics in the environment, including their partner. Here weexamine perspective-taking behaviour in a dyadic conversationtask, where the same individuals act in the role of both speakerand listener. We model perspective-taking in both productionand comprehension, taking into account the dyadic situation.Our findings suggest that conversational partners weight theirown perspective more than the partner’s when speaking, andthe partner’s perspective more than their own when listening.We also find that in both production and comprehension, con-versational partners change the weighting of perspectives overtime, moving towards relying more on the partner’s perspec-tive at the expense of their own perspective. Surprisingly, wefind little evidence that listeners or speakers adapt to the id-iosyncratic statistics of their partner’s linguistic behaviour

Combining Multiple Perspectives in Language Production: A Probabilistic Model

While speakers tailor referring expressions to the knowledgeof their addressees, they do so imperfectly. Our goal here is toprovide an explanation for this type of pattern by extending aprobabilistic model introduced to explain perspective-takingbehavior in comprehension. Using novel production data froma type of knowledge mismatch not previously investigated inproduction, we show that production patterns can also beexplained as arising from the probabilistic combination of thespeaker’s and the addressee’s perspectives. These resultsshow the applicability of the multiple-perspectives approachto language production, and to different types of knowledgemismatch between conversational partners

Asymmetries between uniqueness and familiarity in the semantics of definite descriptions

In over a century of research into the English definite article "the", two main theoretical factors have been identified as relevant to its meaning: namely, (i) uniqueness and (ii) familiarity. The identification of these factors has led to an extensive debate in semantics about which of them is more fundamental to the meaning of "the". In this paper, we contribute to this debate by introducing novel data obtained through two controlled psycholinguistic experiments. We manipulated uniqueness and familiarity of potential referents, examining how these factors affect the comprehension and production of English definite descriptions. The behavioral results reveal an asymmetry between these two factors, with familiarity being a weaker cue than uniqueness – a pattern that is unexpected under any existing theory of definiteness. We close with a discussion of possible extensions to existing theories in light of this result, as well as avenues for future work

Inferring Difficulty: Flexibility in the Real-time Processing of Disfluency

Upon hearing a disfluent referring expression, listeners expect the speaker to refer to an object that is previously-unmentioned, an object that does not have a straightforward label, or an object that requires a longer description. Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments examined whether listeners directly associate disfluency with these properties of objects, or whether disfluency attribution is more flexible and involves situation-specific inferences. Since in natural situations reference to objects that do not have a straightforward label or that require a longer description is correlated with both production difficulty and with disfluency, we used a mini artificial lexicon to dissociate difficulty from these properties, building on the fact that recently-learned names take longer to produce than existing words in one’s mental lexicon. The results demonstrate that disfluency attribution involves situation-specific inferences; we propose that in new situations listeners spontaneously infer what may cause production difficulty. However, the results show that these situation-specific inferences are limited in scope: listeners assessed difficulty relative to their own experience with the artificial names, and did not adapt to the assumed knowledge of the speaker

In COVID-19 Health Messaging, Loss Framing Increases Anxiety with Little-to-No Concomitant Benefits: Experimental Evidence from 84 Countries

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in terms of potential losses (e.g., "If you do not practice these steps, you can endanger yourself and others") or potential gains (e.g., "If you practice these steps, you can protect yourself and others")? Collecting data in 48 languages from 15,929 participants in 84 countries, we experimentally tested the effects of message framing on COVID-19-related judgments, intentions, and feelings. Loss- (vs. gain-) framed messages increased self-reported anxiety among participants cross-nationally with little-to-no impact on policy attitudes, behavioral intentions, or information seeking relevant to pandemic risks. These results were consistent across 84 countries, three variations of the message framing wording, and 560 data processing and analytic choices. Thus, results provide an empirical answer to a global communication question and highlight the emotional toll of loss-framed messages. Critically, this work demonstrates the importance of considering unintended affective consequences when evaluating nudge-style interventions

Identity and Indeterminacy in -ever Free Relatives

From the Proceedings of SALT XVIII, 200

Discourse coherence and the interpretation of accented pronouns

It has long been argued that accenting or stressing a pronoun (i.e., making it prosodically prominent) changes its interpretation as compared to its unaccented counterpart. However, recent experimental work demonstrated that this generalization does not apply when the alternative interpretation of the pronoun is not plausible (Taylor et al., 2013). In a series of three experiments that use an offline comprehension task, we show, first, that the lack of reversal is observed when plausibility is controlled for. We furthermore show that a new generalization cannot be formed by excluding cases where the bias towards the unmarked interpretation is strong or cases where the character in the alternative interpretation is low in salience. Instead, we conclude that what constrains the interpretation of accented pronouns is coherence relations, with parallel discourses exhibiting reversal and result discourses not exhibiting reversal. We propose that the difference between coherence relations should be viewed in what would be the minimal change in order to create a ‘surprising’ or expected’ event, which is the characteristic of accenting more generally

Effects of Prior Mention and Task Goals on Language Processing

This paper investigates the processing of linguistic elements whose interpretation depends on retrieving information that was available earlier in the situation. Using the visual-world paradigm, we examine the processing of the verb return, which requires that an object has previously moved. We manipulated whether the moved object (and the movement itself) was described using language, by its typical label or by its location, or whether it was seen moving without that movement being labeled. We also manipulated whether the instructions were positive (e.g., Return the X), therefore requiring the listener to perform an action, or negative (e.g., Don’t return the X), which required no action. Results reveal a sensitivity to how information was introduced. Most importantly, with positive instructions, the naming of the object did not have an effect, whereas with negative instructions, naming was important to interpretation. These results indicate that the way information is introduced affects the status of this information when it is retrieved; these findings also lead us to explicitly consider the hypotheses that link language processing and visual attention