The role of cognitive control and referential complexity on adults' choice of referring expressions: Testing and expanding the referential complexity scale.

This study aims to advance our understanding of the nature and source(s) of individual differences in pragmatic language behavior over the adult lifespan. Across four story continuation experiments, we probed adults' (N = 496 participants, ages 18-82) choice of referential forms (i.e., names vs. pronouns to refer to the main character). Our manipulations were based on Fossard et al.'s (2018) scale of referential complexity which varies according to the visual properties of the scene: low complexity (one character), intermediate complexity (two characters of different genders), and high complexity (two characters of the same gender). Since pronouns signal topic continuity (i.e., that the discourse will continue to be about the same referent), the use of pronouns is expected to decrease as referential complexity increases. The choice of names versus pronouns, therefore, provides insight into participants' perception of the topicality of a referent, and whether that varies by age and cognitive capacity. In Experiment 1, we used the scale to test the association between referential choice, aging, and cognition, identifying a link between older adults' switching skills and optimal referential choice. In Experiments 2-4, we tested novel manipulations that could impact the scale and found both the TIMING of a competitor referent's presence and EMPHASIS placed on competitors modulated referential choice, leading us to refine the scale for future use. Collectively, Experiments 1-4 highlight what type of contextual information is prioritized at different ages, revealing older adults' preserved sensitivity to (visual) scene complexity but reduced sensitivity to linguistic prominence cues, compared to younger adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning dimensions of meaning: Children's acquisition of but.

Connectives such as but are critical for building coherent discourse. They also express meanings that do not fit neatly into the standard distinction between semantics and implicated pragmatics. How do children acquire them? Corpus analyses indicate that children use these words in a sophisticated way by the early pre-school years, but a small number of experimental studies also suggest that children do not understand that but has a contrastive meaning until they reach school age. In a series of eight experiments we tested children's understanding of contrastive but compared to the causal connective so, by using a word learning paradigm (e.g., It was a warm day but/so Katy put on a pagle). When the connective so was used, we found that even 2-year-olds inferred a novel word meaning that was associated with the sentence context (a t-shirt). However, for the connective but, children did not infer a non-associated contrastive meaning (a winter coat) until age 7. Before that, even 5-year-old children reliably inferred an associated referent, indicating that they failed to correctly assign but a contrastive meaning. Five control experiments ruled out explanations for this pattern based on basic task demands, sentence processing skills or difficulty making adult-like inferences. A sixth experiment reports one particular context in which five-year-olds do interpret but contrastively. However, that same context also leads children to interpret so contrastively. We conclude that children's sophisticated production of connectives like but and so masks a major difficulty learning their meanings. We suggest that discourse connectives incorporate a class of words whose usage is easy to mimic, but whose meanings are difficult to acquire from everyday conversations, with implications for theories of word learning and discourse processing.

This Better Be Interesting: A Speaker's Decision to Speak Cues Listeners to Expect Informative Content.

In anticipating upcoming content, comprehenders are known to rely on real-world knowledge. This knowledge can be deployed directly in favor of upcoming content about typical situations (implying a transparent mapping between the world and what speakers say about the world). Such knowledge can also be used to estimate the likelihood of speech, whereby atypical situations are the ones newsworthy enough to merit reporting (i.e., a nontransparent mapping in which improbable situations yield likely utterances). We report four forced-choice studies (three preregistered) testing this distinction between situation knowledge and speech production likelihood. Comprehenders are shown to anticipate situation-atypical meanings more when guessing content (a) that a speaker announces (rather than thinks), (b) that is said out of the blue (rather than produced when prompted), and (c) that is addressed to a large audience (rather than a single listener). The findings contrast with prior work that emphasizes a comprehension bias in favor of typicality, and they highlight the need for comprehension models that incorporate expectations for informativity (as one of a set of inferred speaker goals) alongside expectations for content plausibility.

Veritable Untruths: Autistic Traits and the Processing of Deception.

How do we decide whether a statement is literally true? Here, we contrast participants' eventual evaluations of a speaker's meaning with the real-time processes of comprehension. We record participants' eye movements as they respond to potentially misleading instructions to click on one of two objects which might be concealing treasure (the treasure is behind thee, uh, hat). Participants are less likely to click on the named object when the instructions are disfluent. However, when hearing disfluent utterances, a tendency to fixate the named object early increases with participants' autism quotient scores. This suggests that, even where utterances are equivalently understood, the processes by which interpretations are achieved vary across individuals.

What's new? A comprehension bias in favor of informativity.

Language is used as a channel by which speakers convey, among other things, newsworthy and informative messages, i.e., content that is otherwise unpredictable to the comprehender. We therefore might expect comprehenders to show a preference for such messages. However, comprehension studies tend to emphasize the opposite: i.e., processing ease for situation-predictable content (e.g., chopping carrots with a knife). Comprehenders are known to deploy knowledge about situation plausibility during processing in fine-grained context-sensitive ways. Using self-paced reading, we test whether comprehenders can also deploy this knowledge in favor of newsworthy content to yield informativity-driven effects alongside, or instead of, plausibility-driven effects. We manipulate semantic context (unusual protagonists), syntactic construction (wh- clefts), and the communicative environment (text messages). Reading times (primarily sentence-finally) show facilitation for sentences containing newsworthy content (e.g., chopping carrots with a shovel), where the content is both unpredictable at the situation level because of its atypicality and also unpredictable at the word level because of the large number of atypical elements a speaker could potentially mention. Our studies are the first to show that informativity-driven effects are observable at all, and the results highlight the need for models that distinguish between comprehenders' estimate of content plausibility and their estimate of a speaker's decision to talk about that content.

Expectations from relative clauses: Real-time coherence updates in discourse processing.

When processing a text, comprehenders use available cues to anticipate both upcoming content and the dependencies that comprise the structure of the growing discourse. In an eye-tracking while reading experiment, we test discourse updating in passages in which dependencies are implicit and the segments convey content that is not required to participate in any coherence-driven inference. This study provides strong evidence of comprehenders' ability to build implicit non-obligatory discourse structure in real time.

The pressure to communicate efficiently continues to shape language use later in life.

Language use is shaped by a pressure to communicate efficiently, yet the tendency towards redundancy is said to increase in older age. The longstanding assumption is that saying more than is necessary is inefficient and may be driven by age-related decline in inhibition (i.e. the ability to filter out irrelevant information). However, recent work proposes an alternative account of efficiency: In certain contexts, redundancy facilitates communication (e.g., when the colour or size of an object is perceptually salient and its mention aids the listener's search). A critical question follows: Are older adults indiscriminately redundant, or do they modulate their use of redundant information to facilitate communication? We tested efficiency and cognitive capacities in 200 adults aged 19-82. Irrespective of age, adults with better attention switching skills were redundant in efficient ways, demonstrating that the pressure to communicate efficiently continues to shape language use later in life.

Interpreting nonverbal cues to deception in real time.

When questioning the veracity of an utterance, we perceive certain non-linguistic behaviours to indicate that a speaker is being deceptive. Recent work has highlighted that listeners' associations between speech disfluency and dishonesty are detectable at the earliest stages of reference comprehension, suggesting that the manner of spoken delivery influences pragmatic judgements concurrently with the processing of lexical information. Here, we investigate the integration of a speaker's gestures into judgements of deception, and ask if and when associations between nonverbal cues and deception emerge. Participants saw and heard a video of a potentially dishonest speaker describe treasure hidden behind an object, while also viewing images of both the named object and a distractor object. Their task was to click on the object behind which they believed the treasure to actually be hidden. Eye and mouse movements were recorded. Experiment 1 investigated listeners' associations between visual cues and deception, using a variety of static and dynamic cues. Experiment 2 focused on adaptor gestures. We show that a speaker's nonverbal behaviour can have a rapid and direct influence on listeners' pragmatic judgements, supporting the idea that communication is fundamentally multimodal.

Intersentential coreference expectations reflect mental models of events.

Comprehenders' perception of the world is mediated by the mental models they construct. During discourse processing, incoming information allows comprehenders to update their model of the events being described. At the same time, comprehenders use these models to generate expectations about who or what will be mentioned next. The temporal dynamics of this interdependence between language processing and mental event representation has been difficult to disentangle. The present visual world eye-tracking experiment measures listeners' coreference expectations during an intersentential pause between a sentence about a transfer-of-possession event and a continuation mentioning either its Source or Goal. We found a temporally dispersed but sustained preference for fixating the Goal that was significantly greater when the event was described as completed rather than incomplete (passed versus was passing). This aligns with reported offline sensitivity to event structure, as conveyed via verb aspect, and provides new evidence that our mental model of an event leads to early and, crucially, proactive expectations about subsequent mention in the upcoming discourse.

Individual differences in switching and inhibition predict perspective-taking across the lifespan.

Studies exploring the influence of executive functions (EF) on perspective-taking have focused on inhibition and working memory in young adults or clinical populations. Less consideration has been given to more complex capacities that also involve switching attention between perspectives, or to changes in EF and concomitant effects on perspective-taking across the lifespan. To address this, we assessed whether individual differences in inhibition and attentional switching in healthy adults (ages 17-84) predict performance on a task in which speakers identified targets for a listener with size-contrasting competitors in common or privileged ground. Modification differences across conditions decreased with age. Further, perspective taking interacted with EF measures: youngest adults' sensitivity to perspective was best captured by their inhibitory performance; oldest adults' sensitivity was best captured by switching performance. Perspective-taking likely involves multiple aspects of EF, as revealed by considering a wider range of EF tasks and individual capacities across the lifespan.

Cues to Lying May be Deceptive: Speaker and Listener Behaviour in an Interactive Game of Deception.

Are the cues that speakers produce when lying the same cues that listeners attend to when attempting to detect deceit? We used a two-person interactive game to explore the production and perception of speech and nonverbal cues to lying. In each game turn, participants viewed pairs of images, with the location of some treasure indicated to the speaker but not to the listener. The speaker described the location of the treasure, with the objective of misleading the listener about its true location; the listener attempted to locate the treasure, based on their judgement of the speaker's veracity. In line with previous comprehension research, listeners' responses suggest that they attend primarily to behaviours associated with increased mental difficulty, perhaps because lying, under a cognitive hypothesis, is thought to cause an increased cognitive load. Moreover, a mouse-tracking analysis suggests that these judgements are made quickly, while the speakers' utterances are still unfolding. However, there is a surprising mismatch between listeners and speakers: When producing false statements, speakers are less likely to produce the cues that listeners associate with lying. This production pattern is in keeping with an attempted control hypothesis, whereby liars may take into account listeners' expectations and correspondingly manipulate their behaviour to avoid detection.

Visual Complexity and Its Effects on Referring Expression Generation.

Speakers' perception of a visual scene influences the language they use to describe it-which objects they choose to mention and how they characterize the relationships between them. We show that visual complexity can either delay or facilitate description generation, depending on how much disambiguating information is required and how useful the scene's complexity can be in providing, for example, helpful landmarks. To do so, we measure speech onset times, eye gaze, and utterance content in a reference production experiment in which the target object is either unique or non-unique in a visual scene of varying size and complexity. Speakers delay speech onset if the target object is non-unique and requires disambiguation, and we argue that this reflects the cost of deciding on a high-level strategy for describing it. The eye-tracking data demonstrate that these delays increase when speakers are able to conduct an extensive early visual search, implying that when speakers scan too little of the scene early on, they may decide to begin speaking before becoming aware that their description is underspecified. Speakers' content choices reflect the visual makeup of the scene-the number of distractors present and the availability of useful landmarks. Our results highlight the complex role of visual perception in reference production, showing that speakers can make good use of complexity in ways that reflect their visual processing of the scene.

Form and function: Optional complementizers reduce causal inferences.

Many factors are known to influence the inference of the discourse coherence relationship between two sentences. Here, we examine the relationship between two conjoined embedded clauses in sentences like The professor noted that the student teacher did not look confident and (that) the students were poorly behaved. In two studies, we find that the presence of that before the second embedded clause in such sentences reduces the possibility of a forward causal relationship between the clauses, i.e., the inference that the student teacher's confidence was what affected student behavior. Three further studies tested the possibility of a backward causal relationship between clauses in the same structure, and found that the complementizer's presence aids that relationship, especially in a forced-choice paradigm. The empirical finding that a complementizer, a linguistic element associated primarily with structure rather than event-level semantics, can affect discourse coherence is novel and illustrates an interdependence between syntactic parsing and discourse parsing.

Effects of Disfluency in Online Interpretation of Deception.

A speaker's manner of delivery of an utterance can affect a listener's pragmatic interpretation of the message. Disfluencies (such as filled pauses) influence a listener's off-line assessment of whether the speaker is truthful or deceptive. Do listeners also form this assessment during the moment-by-moment processing of the linguistic message? Here we present two experiments that examined listeners' judgments of whether a speaker was indicating the true location of the prize in a game during fluent and disfluent utterances. Participants' eye and mouse movements were biased toward the location named by the speaker during fluent utterances, whereas the opposite bias was observed during disfluent utterances. This difference emerged rapidly after the onset of the critical noun. Participants were similarly sensitive to disfluencies at the start of the utterance (Experiment 1) and in the middle (Experiment 2). Our findings support recent research showing that listeners integrate pragmatic information alongside semantic content during the earliest moments of language processing. Unlike prior work which has focused on pragmatic effects in the interpretation of the literal message, here we highlight disfluency's role in guiding a listener to an alternative non-literal message.

Giving Good Directions: Order of Mention Reflects Visual Salience.

In complex stimuli, there are many different possible ways to refer to a specified target. Previous studies have shown that when people are faced with such a task, the content of their referring expression reflects visual properties such as size, salience, and clutter. Here, we extend these findings and present evidence that (i) the influence of visual perception on sentence construction goes beyond content selection and in part determines the order in which different objects are mentioned and (ii) order of mention influences comprehension. Study 1 (a corpus study of reference productions) shows that when a speaker uses a relational description to mention a salient object, that object is treated as being in the common ground and is more likely to be mentioned first. Study 2 (a visual search study) asks participants to listen to referring expressions and find the specified target; in keeping with the above result, we find that search for easy-to-find targets is faster when the target is mentioned first, while search for harder-to-find targets is facilitated by mentioning the target later, after a landmark in a relational description. Our findings show that seemingly low-level and disparate mental "modules" like perception and sentence planning interact at a high level and in task-dependent ways.

Evoking Context with Contrastive Stress: Effects on Pragmatic Enrichment.

Although it is widely acknowledged that context influences a variety of pragmatic phenomena, it is not clear how best to articulate this notion of context and thereby explain the nature of its influence. In this paper, we target contextual alternatives that are evoked via focus placement and test how the same contextual manipulation can influence three different phenomena that involve pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature, presupposition, and coreference. We argue that focus placement influences these three phenomena indirectly by providing the listener with information about the likely question under discussion (QUD) that a particular utterance answers (Roberts, 1996/2012). In three listening experiments, we find that the predicted interpretations are indeed made more available when focus placement is added to the final element (to the scalar adjective, to an entity embedded under the negated presupposition trigger, and to the predicate of a pronoun). These findings bring together several distinct strands of work on the effect of focus placement on interpretation all in the domain of pragmatic enrichment. Together they advance our empirical understanding of the relation between focus placement and QUD and highlight commonalities between implicature, presupposition, and coreference.

Anticipatory looks reveal expectations about discourse relations.

Previous research provides evidence for expectation-driven processing within sentences at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. Less well-established is whether comprehenders also anticipate pragmatic relationships between sentences. To address this, we evaluate a unit of discourse structure that comprehenders must infer to hold between sentences in order for a discourse to make sense-the intersentential coherence relation. In a novel eyetracking paradigm, we trained participants to associate particular spatial locations with particular coherence relations. Experiment 1 shows that the subset of listeners who successfully acquired the location∼relation mappings during training subsequently looked to these locations during testing in response to a coherence-signaling intersentential connective. Experiment 2 finds that listeners' looks during sentences containing coherence-biasing verbs reveal expectations about upcoming sentence types. This work extends existing research on prediction beyond sentence-internal structure and provides a new methodology for examining the cues that comprehenders use to establish relationships at the discourse level.

Markers of topical discourse in child-directed speech.

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provides new opportunities for listeners to infer speaker meaning. Such inferences allow the listener to build up a representation of the speakers' intended topic and more generally to identify relationships, structures, and messages that extend across multiple utterances. We address this issue by analyzing a video corpus of child-caregiver interactions. We use topic continuity as an index of discourse structure, examining how caregivers introduce and discuss objects across utterances. For the analysis, utterances are grouped into topical discourse sequences using three annotation strategies: raw annotations of speakers' referents, the output of a model that groups utterances based on those annotations, and the judgments of human coders. We analyze how the lexical, syntactic, and social properties of caregiver-child interaction change over the course of a sequence of topically related utterances. Our findings suggest that many cues used to signal topicality in adult discourse are also available in child-directed speech.

Where's Wally: the influence of visual salience on referring expression generation.

REFERRING EXPRESSION GENERATION (REG) PRESENTS THE CONVERSE PROBLEM TO VISUAL SEARCH: given a scene and a specified target, how does one generate a description which would allow somebody else to quickly and accurately locate the target?Previous work in psycholinguistics and natural language processing has failed to find an important and integrated role for vision in this task. That previous work, which relies largely on simple scenes, tends to treat vision as a pre-process for extracting feature categories that are relevant to disambiguation. However, the visual search literature suggests that some descriptions are better than others at enabling listeners to search efficiently within complex stimuli. This paper presents a study testing whether participants are sensitive to visual features that allow them to compose such "good" descriptions. Our results show that visual properties (salience, clutter, area, and distance) influence REG for targets embedded in images from the Where's Wally? books. Referring expressions for large targets are shorter than those for smaller targets, and expressions about targets in highly cluttered scenes use more words. We also find that participants are more likely to mention non-target landmarks that are large, salient, and in close proximity to the target. These findings identify a key role for visual salience in language production decisions and highlight the importance of scene complexity for REG.

Integration of pragmatic and phonetic cues in spoken word recognition.

Although previous research has established that multiple top-down factors guide the identification of words during speech processing, the ultimate range of information sources that listeners integrate from different levels of linguistic structure is still unknown. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether comprehenders can integrate information from the 2 most disparate domains: pragmatic inference and phonetic perception. Using contexts that trigger pragmatic expectations regarding upcoming coreference (expectations for either he or she), we test listeners' identification of phonetic category boundaries (using acoustically ambiguous words on the /hi/∼/∫i/ continuum). The results indicate that, in addition to phonetic cues, word recognition also reflects pragmatic inference. These findings are consistent with evidence for top-down contextual effects from lexical, syntactic, and semantic cues, but they extend this previous work by testing cues at the pragmatic level and by eliminating a statistical-frequency confound that might otherwise explain the previously reported results. We conclude by exploring the time course of this interaction and discussing how different models of cue integration could be adapted to account for our results.