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Addressees' needs influence speakers' early syntactic choices.
Calion B Lockridge1, Susan E Brennan
1State University of New York, Stony Brook 11794-2500, USA.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|November 5, 2002
Summary
Speakers adjust their language based on what listeners know, especially when describing unusual objects. This study shows speakers consider visual information when deciding how to phrase their sentences.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- A debate exists in psycholinguistics regarding how speakers adapt their language (utterance packaging) to listeners' knowledge and needs.
- Previous research (Brown & Dell, 1987) suggested that mentioning atypical instruments in story retellings is driven by speaker ease, not listener adaptation.
- The prior study's methodology involved confederates repeatedly hearing stories, potentially limiting the investigation of genuine addressee-driven adjustments.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether speakers adjust their utterance packaging based on addressees' visual knowledge.
- To re-examine the claim that instrument mention in story retellings is solely based on speaker ease.
- To determine if manipulating addressees' visual information influences speakers' linguistic choices.
Main Methods:
- Speakers retold stories to naive addressees.
- Addressees were divided into two groups: one group viewed a picture illustrating the story's action and instrument, while the other did not.
- Linguistic analyses focused on the mention of instruments, their timing (e.g., within the same clause as the action verb), and grammatical marking (e.g., indefinite).
Main Results:
- Speakers were more likely to mention atypical instruments when addressees lacked visual information (pictures).
- Atypical instruments were mentioned earlier in the sentence (closer to the action verb) by speakers addressing listeners without visual aids.
- Speakers used indefinite marking more frequently for atypical instruments when addressees lacked visual context.
Conclusions:
- The findings suggest that speakers do adjust their language to account for addressees' knowledge, particularly when visual information is absent.
- The study challenges the previous conclusion that linguistic packaging is independent of addressee knowledge, highlighting the role of visual copresence.
- Speakers' early syntactic choices, such as instrument mention and marking, are sensitive to the visual context available to the addressee.