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Related Experiment Video

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Fine-Tuning Large Language Models Using Entity Hallucination Index for Text Summarization
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Striving for optimal relevance when answering questions.

Raymond W Gibbs1, Gregory A Bryant

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. gibbs@ucsc.edu

Cognition
|April 17, 2007
PubMed
Summary

People often give rounded time answers to be optimally relevant to listeners. This study shows how language use, including hesitations, reveals cognitive efforts in communication.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Understanding how people communicate time is crucial for analyzing conversational dynamics.
  • Previous research suggests a drive for optimal relevance in human interaction.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how people answer questions about the time in real-life scenarios.
  • To explore the hypothesis that people provide optimally relevant, often rounded, time responses.
  • To analyze linguistic features like hesitations and pauses in time-related conversations.

Main Methods:

  • Conducted four experiments to collect real-life verbal responses to time-related questions.
  • Analyzed non-numeral words, hesitation markers (e.g., "uh", "um"), and response latencies.
  • Examined the relationship between linguistic features and the principle of optimal relevance.

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Main Results:

  • People frequently provide rounded, rather than exact, time estimations.
  • Discourse markers, hesitations, and pauses are strategically used to convey information efficiently.
  • These linguistic elements help maximize cognitive effects for listeners while minimizing their processing effort.

Conclusions:

  • Relevance considerations significantly shape collaborative language use in everyday conversations.
  • The study provides empirical evidence for how speakers manage cognitive load and listener inference.
  • Findings offer insights into the pragmatic principles governing spontaneous verbal communication.