Influence of perspective and goals on reference production in conversation

Abstract

we evaluated a new hypothesis-that the relevance of the addressee's perspective depends on the speaker's goals. In two experiments, Korean speakers described a target object in situations in which the perspective status of a competitor object (e.g., a large plate when describing a smaller plate) was manipulated. In Experiment 1, we examined whether speakers would use scalar-modified expressions even when the competitor was hidden from the addressee. The results demonstrated that information from both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives influenced production. In Experiment 2, we examined whether utterance goals modulate this process. The results indicated that when a speaker makes a request, the addressee's perspective has a stronger influence than it does when the speaker informs the addressee. These results suggest that privileged knowledge does shape language use, but crucially, that the degree to which the addressee's perspective is considered is shaped by the relevance of the addressee's perspective to the utterance goals.

An early influence of common ground during speech planning

“…However, the availability of privileged information also led to the production of utterances that did not take this perspective difference into account. These findings are in line with previous studies using similar paradigms (Wardlow Lane et al, 2006;Yoon et al, 2012). Interestingly, speakers even failed to completely ignore privileged information when it harmed communication (i.e.…”

“…In line with previous studies using similar paradigms (Wardlow Lane et al, 2006;Yoon et al, 2012), we found that speakers cannot completely ignore privileged information during language production and that the availability of privileged information can lead to the production of utterances that do not take the addressee's visual perspective into account. However, we found no evidence that adapting to your addressee's visual perspective requires additional planning time, suggesting that audience design is not necessarily effortful.…”

“…Participants Twenty-two pairs of native Dutch speakers played a computerised version of a referential communication game (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000;Yoon et al, 2012). Participants did not know each other before the start of the experiment.…”

“…According to Grice's Maxim of Quantity, the speaker should not use a size-contrasting adjective, because the smaller bottle is occluded from the listener's point of view. However, speakers in this situation regularly use a size adjective (Horton & Keysar, 1996;Wardlow Lane & Ferreira, 2008;Yoon, Koh, & Brown-Schmidt, 2012). In this case, an overspecification does not prevent the listener from identifying the intended referent.…”

Producing Referring Expressions in Identification Tasks and Route Directions: What’s the Difference?

“…"), they avoided scalar adjectives that were unnecessary for identification from a listener point of view. Contrastingly, when they had to describe events (inform the addressee, e.g., "The experimenter will move the plate to the left"), they referred to the size of the object more frequently (Yoon, Koh, & Brown-Schmidt, 2012).…”