When conceptual pacts are broken: Partner-specific effects on the comprehension of referring expressions

Metzing, Charles A.; Brennan, Susan E.

doi:10.1016/s0749-596x(03)00028-7

Cited by 279 publications

(399 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…That conversational partners develop local norms of communication during interactions has been well demonstrated (e.g., Brennan & Clark, 1996;Garrod & Doherty, 1994). In addition, whereas the long-term memory properties of these norms have not been explored over time spans of the sort considered in our experiments, it is not unreasonable to surmise that these adaptations would function in manner similar to what was observed here: the development of local norms may not necessarily change a person's linguistic behavior in the broad sense (i.e., once conversational partners leave a specific dialogue; Metzing & Brennan, 2003), but it may strongly affect the person's behavior if he/ she returns to the same general context of language use (e.g., having a conversation with the same partner). We believe that an exploration of these issues will be essential to discerning how linguistic experience within particular contexts affects subsequent language behavior in similar and different contexts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) one week

2010

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We present an experiment that explores the degree to which cumulative structural priming effects of the sort reported in Kaschak (Memory and Cognition 35:925-937, 2007) persist over the course of a week. In the first session of the experiment, participants completed written sentence stems that were designed to bias them toward producing the double object (Meghan gave Michael a toy) or prepositional object (Meghan gave a toy to Michael) construction. Participants returned for a second session of the experiment a week later. We observed that the biases established in the first phase of the experiment affected performance in the second phase. That is, the cumulative priming effect persisted for a week. The implications of this result for theories of language production are discussed.Keywords Language production . Structural priming . Syntax . Implicit learning . Linguistic adaptation Structural priming refers to the tendency for language users to repeat syntactic structures across utterances (Bock, 1986). To illustrate using a particularly well-studied example, individuals who have recently heard or produced a double object construction (Meghan gave Michael a hug; DO) are more likely to subsequently produce another DO construction (The teacher sent the students a message) than to produce a prepositional object construction (The teacher sent a message to the students; PO). Structural priming is an extremely robust phenomenon. It has been observed in

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) one week

2010

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“…In one condition, their director either continued with the same matcher or was paired with a new matcher after the first block of trials. Brennan and Clark found greater carryover of the specific terms when the matcher remained the same, and on this basis they argued for the importance of conceptual pacts between speakers and addressees-that is, of agreement between the partners about how to characterize the object-in promoting carryover (see also Metzing & Brennan, 2003;cf. Barr & Keysar, 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conversation and convention: Enduring influences on name choice for common objects

Malt

Sloman

2004

Memory & Cognition

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The name chosen for an object is influenced by both short-term history (e.g., speaker-addressee pacts) and long-term history (e.g., the language's naming pattern for the domain). But these influences must somehow be linked. We propose that names adopted through speaker-addressee collaboration have influences that carry beyond the original context. To test this hypothesis, we adapted the standard referential communication task. The first director of each matching session was a confederate who introduced one of two possible names for each object. The director role then rotated to naive participants. The participants later rated name preference for the introduced and alternative names for each object. They also rated object typicality or similarity to each named category. The name that was initially introduced influenced later name use and preference, even for participants who had not heard the name from the original director. Typicality and similarity showed lesser effects from the names originally introduced. Name associations built in one context appear to influence retrieval and use of names in other contexts, but they have reduced impact on nonlinguistic object knowledge. These results support the notion that stable conventions for object names within a linguistic community may arise from local interactions, and they demonstrate how different populations of speakers may come to have a shared understanding of objects' nonlinguistic properties but different naming patterns.

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“…Labelled by Dale & Reiter (1995) as reference scripts, previously used sets of features and values may be used by speakers in subsequent REs, even if they are not contrastive in a given array. Whilst in line with work on conceptual pacts (Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs 1986;Metzing & Brennan 2003), predictions from a reference script approach were not realised by some of the older literature, e.g., Pechmann (1989: 106) wherein speakers did not produce lists of feature-value clusters for consecutive descriptions. However, Brennan and Clark's (1996) work on lexical entrainment shows that increasing levels of specification persevere over time, even when concurrent arrays do not demand a higherlevel term than the basic-level RE.…”

Section:  Apparent Overspecification: Speakers Contrast Between Cumentioning

confidence: 87%

7. Reference and Informativeness as cognitive processes in verbal communication

Davies¹,

Katsos²

2016

Verbal Communication

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Overspecification in reference is the provision of more information than is minimally required for a hearer to identify an intended referent, e.g., 'the stripy bowl' in the context of a single bowl. Since this kind of referring expression is not predicted by traditional accounts of reference, this chapter reviews research documenting the frequency of such expressions in various contexts. Drawing together recent empirical findings, it proposes reasons for overspecified reference from both the speaker's and the addressee's perspective. The pragmatic, cognitive and social significance of overspecification is discussed, and applications of research in this area are considered. We close by suggesting promising future directions for this strand of research.

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When conceptual pacts are broken: Partner-specific effects on the comprehension of referring expressions

Cited by 279 publications

References 21 publications

Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) one week

Long-term cumulative structural priming persists for (at least) one week

Conversation and convention: Enduring influences on name choice for common objects

7. Reference and Informativeness as cognitive processes in verbal communication

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