Perspective Taking and the Coordination of Meaning in Language Use

“I know something you don’t know”: Discourse and social context effects on the N400 in adolescents

“…One of the central questions in the on-line perspective taking literature is: when does information about others affect language comprehension (Barr & Keysar, 2006;Brennan et al, 2010;Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011) . Advocates of full constraint models argue that language comprehension can be affected from the very onset by assumptions about what other speakers know or see (Clark, 1996;Hanna et al, 2003), while partial constraint and no constraint models suggest that language comprehension is initially egocentric, and that initial interpretations are adjusted to take others' perspectives into account in later processing stages (Keysar et al, 2000;Kronmüller & Barr, 2007).…”

“…Similarly, information about what a speaker can or cannot know, based on his/her background knowledge affects listeners' interpretation of ambiguous utterances (Brown-Schmidt, 2009;Hanna, Tanenhaus, & Trueswell, 2003/7;Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000). There is general consensus in the adult literature that information about others affects language comprehension, although considerable debate persists about when and how social information influences language comprehension (Barr & Keysar, 2006;Brennan, Galati, & Kuhlen, 2010;Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011). The limited research done with adolescents in similar scenarios suggests that while adolescents are sensitive to the perspective of others during language comprehension, their ability to integrate this information on-line continues to improve throughout late adolescence (Dumontheil, Apperly, & Blakemore, 2010).…”

Producing Pronouns and Definite Noun Phrases: Do Speakers Use the Addressee’s Discourse Model?

“…Indeed, it has been argued that audience design primarily occurs in utterance repairs (Barr & Keysar, 2006;Brown & Dell, 1987;Dell & Brown, 1991;Horton & Keysar, 1996): Routine language production processes proceed egocentrically, but during later production processes, speakers monitor and adjust the infelicity of their utterance by accommodating the addressee's perspective (the monitoring and adjustment hypothesis). According to this idea, the speaker's knowledge of what the addressee knows or does not know only optionally influences language production processes (see Barr & Keysar, 2006 for a review).…”

“…According to this idea, the speaker's knowledge of what the addressee knows or does not know only optionally influences language production processes (see Barr & Keysar, 2006 for a review). In keeping with this, the results of Horton and Keysar (1996) suggest that visual perspective-taking only occurs when speakers are not under time pressure: When they are under time pressure, they tend to produce as many modifiers when the addressee can see the competitor as when s ⁄ he cannot.…”

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“…This work has significance not only in a linguistic context but also to the psychology of language processing and Theory of Mind, the ability to take into account interlocutors" epistemic state (see Barr & Keysar, 2007;Hanna, Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 2003;. On another front, research on figurative language by Gibbs, Glucksberg and colleagues, among others, has produced evidence against the pervasive notion in psycholinguistics that pragmatics is secondary to syntax and semantics (see chapters 2 and 3 in for an overview).…”