Reference Production and Comprehension: the Roles of Egocentric and Joint Attention

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

When speakers refer to things in the world around them, they must constantly make choices about how explicit to make their references, choosing between forms like "Clinton", "the senator from New York", and "she". As listeners hear these references, they have to figure out which person the speaker is referring to, despite the fact that the input itself is often insufficient to identify a unique referent. It has been proposed that this is possible because speakers and listeners keep track of which entities are likely to be in the focus of attention of discourse participants, which allows speakers to use less specific forms (e.g., "she"), and listeners to understand them. However, there are many unanswered questions about exactly how speakers and listeners model this joint focus of attention, and how individual, internal processing effort and focus of attention impact reference production and understanding. This project investigates how reference processing is influenced by both public, shared information about the attention of discourse participants, and non-public, non-discourse-based attention and processing effort. It offers a comprehensive examination of the interaction between individual attention and linguistic information, by simultaneously studying the processes of reference production and comprehension, and by adopting techniques from the visual attention literature to manipulate focus of attention. Comprehension studies use eye-tracking techniques to understand the judgments that occur within a few hundred milliseconds. The findings of this project will contribute to a mechanistic understanding of the common and yet pragmatically complex human ability to communicate reference.