The production and comprehension of referring expressions: Definite description

Heller, Daphna

doi:10.1111/lnc3.12370

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 87 publications

(137 reference statements)

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“…In a referential task such as this one, a referring expression starting with “ the empty ” tends to create the expectation that the referent would be the empty jar; “ empty ” is less likely to be used for a martini glass because this information would not distinguish between the two glasses (see Heller, 2020 for a review). In contrast, the linguistic information given by the experimenter incorrectly described the situation as containing two empty jars, one empty martini glass, and one martini glass with olives.…”

Section: Going Beyond Mutual Knowledge or Why We Need A New Theory Of...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication

Heller¹,

Brown‐Schmidt

2023

Cognitive Science

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Inspired by early proposals in philosophy, dominant accounts of language posit a central role for mutual knowledge, either encoded directly in common ground, or approximated through other cognitive mechanisms. Using existing empirical evidence from language and memory, we challenge this tradition, arguing that mutual knowledge captures only a subset of the mental states needed to support communication. In a novel theoretical proposal, we argue for a cognitive architecture that includes separate, distinct representations of the self and other, and a cognitive process that compares these representations continuously during conversation, outputting both similarities and differences in perspective. Our theory accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel predictions about the role of perspective in language use. We term this new account the Multiple Perspectives Theory of mental states in communication.

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Section: Going Beyond Mutual Knowledge or Why We Need A New Theory Of...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication

Heller¹,

Brown‐Schmidt

2023

Cognitive Science

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“…The results of the current study have implications for referential communication research, including models of reference production. In general, by taking a production perspective, experiments like ours add to previous work that investigates real-time language processing (e.g., Tanenhaus et al, 1995;among many others), also in dialogue settings (e.g., Heller, 2020;Tanenhaus & Brown-Schmidt, 2008). By combining direct measures of visual attention with more indirect ones (such as SOTs or descriptive content), our experiment respects language production as a process that is incremental by nature (e.g., Heller, 2020;Levelt, 1989;Pechmann, 1989).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…In general, by taking a production perspective, experiments like ours add to previous work that investigates real-time language processing (e.g., Tanenhaus et al, 1995;among many others), also in dialogue settings (e.g., Heller, 2020;Tanenhaus & Brown-Schmidt, 2008). By combining direct measures of visual attention with more indirect ones (such as SOTs or descriptive content), our experiment respects language production as a process that is incremental by nature (e.g., Heller, 2020;Levelt, 1989;Pechmann, 1989). Our results-with different eye movement patterns in different time frames-show the added value of real-time eye-tracking measures to examine how visual processing ties in with reference production.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Realistic About Reference Production: Testing the Effects of Domain Size and Saturation

Koolen,

Krahmer

2024

Cognitive Science

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Experiments on visually grounded, definite reference production often manipulate simple visual scenes in the form of grids filled with objects, for example, to test how speakers are affected by the number of objects that are visible. Regarding the latter, it was found that speech onset times increase along with domain size, at least when speakers refer to nonsalient target objects that do not pop out of the visual domain. This finding suggests that even in the case of many distractors, speakers perform object‐by‐object scans of the visual scene. The current study investigates whether this systematic processing strategy can be explained by the simplified nature of the scenes that were used, and if different strategies can be identified for photo‐realistic visual scenes. In doing so, we conducted a preregistered experiment that manipulated domain size and saturation; replicated the measures of speech onset times; and recorded eye movements to measure speakers’ viewing strategies more directly. Using controlled photo‐realistic scenes, we find (1) that speech onset times increase linearly as more distractors are present; (2) that larger domains elicit relatively fewer fixation switches back and forth between the target and its distractors, mainly before speech onset; and (3) that speakers fixate the target relatively less often in larger domains, mainly after speech onset. We conclude that careful object‐by‐object scans remain the dominant strategy in our photo‐realistic scenes, to a limited extent combined with low‐level saliency mechanisms. A relevant direction for future research would be to employ less controlled photo‐realistic stimuli that do allow for interpretation based on context.

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“…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).…”

Section: Background Empirical Evidence For Overmodificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Color Overmodification Emerges from Data-Driven Learning and Pragmatic Reasoning

Fang¹,

Sinha²,

Goodman³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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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.

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The production and comprehension of referring expressions: Definite description

Cited by 6 publications

References 87 publications

The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication

The Multiple Perspectives Theory of Mental States in Communication

Realistic About Reference Production: Testing the Effects of Domain Size and Saturation

Color Overmodification Emerges from Data-Driven Learning and Pragmatic Reasoning

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