What language processing can tell us about perspective taking: A reply to Bezuidenhout (2013)

Brown‐Schmidt, Sarah; Heller, Daphna

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.003

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…One question which has plagued the literature on language production is that of whether, and to what extent, speakers actually tailor their utterances to their audience (Brown-Schmidt & Heller, 2014; Clark & Murphy, 1982; Horton & Keysar, 1996). This is also known as the issue of audience design .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to “overinformative” referring expressions.

Degen¹,

Hawkins²,

Graf³

et al. 2020

Psychological Review

131

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Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to account for the seemingly irrational overinformativeness ubiquitous in referring expressions. Here we present a novel production model of referring expressions within the Rational Speech Act framework that treats speakers as agents that rationally trade off cost and informativeness of utterances. Crucially, we relax the assumption that informativeness is computed with respect to a deterministic Boolean semantics, in favor of a nondeterministic continuous semantics. This innovation allows us to capture a large number of seemingly disparate phenomena within one unified framework: the basic asymmetry in speakers’ propensity to overmodify with color rather than size; the increase in overmodification in complex scenes; the increase in overmodification with atypical features; and the increase in specificity in nominal reference as a function of typicality. These findings cast a new light on the production of referring expressions: rather than being wastefully overinformative, reference is usefully redundant.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to “overinformative” referring expressions.

Degen¹,

Hawkins²,

Graf³

et al. 2020

Psychological Review

131

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The visual world paradigm has also been used to examine the timing and integration of visual perspective taking during on-line referential communication (e.g. Brown-Schmidt & Heller, 2014; Hanna, Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 2003). In this variation, a discrepancy of perspective is established between a listener and a speaker by varying the physical co-presence of objects available for reference on a visual display.…”

Section: The Visual World Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Words are not enough: how preschoolers’ integration of perspective and emotion informs their referential understanding

2016

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When linguistic information alone does not clarify a speaker's intended meaning, skilled communicators can draw on a variety of cues to infer communicative intent. In this paper, we review research examining the developmental emergence of preschoolers' sensitivity to a communicative partner's perspective. We focus particularly on preschoolers' tendency to use cues both within the communicative context (i.e. a speaker's visual access to information) and within the speech signal itself (i.e. emotional prosody) to make on-line inferences about communicative intent. Our review demonstrates that preschoolers' ability to use visual and emotional cues of perspective to guide language interpretation is not uniform across tasks, is sometimes related to theory of mind and executive function skills, and, at certain points of development, is only revealed by implicit measures of language processing.

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“…Two studies have found a positive relation between executive function and the use of perspective in language comprehension. In one study , 4‐year‐olds with greater scores on a conflict inhibition task were less likely to consider information their speaker was not privy to (see , for similar findings with adults). Similarly, in a longitudinal study , conflict inhibition at 4 years significantly predicted the ability to evaluate the clarity of referential statements from another person's perspective at ages 4½ and 5 years.…”

Section: Which Cognitive Abilities May Be Necessary For Communicativementioning

confidence: 89%

“…According to early integration accounts , perspective inferences influence spoken language comprehension from the earliest moments of processing. Proponents of this view suggest that listeners track information about their speakers' perspective rapidly, if not automatically, because they are inherently motivated to consider the perspective of their communicative partners . Perspective inferences thus act as immediate constraints on language processing because they can inform the interpretation of sentences as they unfold.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Perspective on Children's Communicative Perspective Taking: When and How Do Children Use Perspective Inferences to Inform Their Comprehension of Spoken Language?

Juan

Khu

Graham

2015

Child Dev Perspectives

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Successful communication often requires a listener to reason about a speaker's perspective to make inferences about communicative intent. Although children can use perspective reasoning to influence their interpretation of spoken utterances, when and how children integrate perspective reasoning with language comprehension remain unclear. These questions are central to theoretical debates in language processing and have led to competing accounts of communicative perspective taking: early versus late integration. In this article, we examine how developmental evidence addresses the predictions of each account. Specifically, we review evidence to determine whether children can rapidly integrate perspective inferences when processing spoken language while central abilities (i.e., executive function and theory of mind) are still emerging.

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What language processing can tell us about perspective taking: A reply to Bezuidenhout (2013)

Cited by 5 publications

References 52 publications

When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to “overinformative” referring expressions.

When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to “overinformative” referring expressions.

Words are not enough: how preschoolers’ integration of perspective and emotion informs their referential understanding

A New Perspective on Children's Communicative Perspective Taking: When and How Do Children Use Perspective Inferences to Inform Their Comprehension of Spoken Language?

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