Tesis Doctorado
Listeners adaptatión to the local and global environments of languaje use.
Autor
Kronmuller, Edmundo Matías
Institución
Resumen
Two experiments were conducted to address how listeners infer speakers communicative interntions from multiple sources of infomration under the performance and time constrainsts of a conversation. It was hypothesized that listerners adapt to conversational demands by integrating information that would help avoid misunderstandings. It was also hypothesized taht this integration of information takes place after the deployment of fast-acting default heuristics that are not sensitive to the current context but that sensitive to general patterns of language use. Participants played a referential communication game and their eye-movements and referent selection were recorded. In Experiment 1, referential ambiguity was introduced to determine whether this would alter listeners default tendency to map a precedent to its referent independently of whether or not the precedent is mutually known. Listeners integrated speakers perspective because it helped disambiguate the referential expression. This occurred, however, only after the deployment of the entrainment heuristic, which maps an old expression to an old referent independently of informationabout the speakers perspective. In Experiment 2, one of two speakers named referents inconsistently to determine whether this would attenuate the tendency to map a new expression onto a nameless object. Listeners integrated information regarding referential fit, but not information related to the characteristics of the speaker. This integration of further information, however, took place after the deployment of the preemption heuristic, which maps a new referring expression onto a nameless object independently of the presence of inconsistency. It is concluded that listeners can adapt to the local conversational environment, and that this adaptability is the source of the flexibility of interpretation, an important characteristic of human communication. However, the adaptation to the local conversational environment has a limit, which is listeners adaptation to the global conversational environment. Adaptation at these two levels explains the ease and accuracy of everyday conversatioanl language comprehension. PFCHA-Becas Doctor of Philosophy 87p. PFCHA-Becas TERMINADA