Understanding perspective-taking in multiparty conversations: insights from Mandarin nouns.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Human communication relies on adopting others' perspectives for language interpretation and response generation.
• Understanding how individuals process multiple perspectives in real-time conversation is crucial for comprehending communication dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how Mandarin speakers utilize perspective information to resolve bare noun references when interacting with two interlocutors.
• To determine if participants distinguish between individual interlocutor perspectives or treat them collectively.

Main Methods:

• A referential game paradigm was employed to manipulate the visual perspectives of two simulated interlocutors.
• Experiments varied speaker seating arrangements and shared visual fields to test perspective-taking strategies.

Main Results:

• Participants equally considered both interlocutors' perspectives in a baseline condition (Experiment 1).
• In a condition with unequal visual field sharing, participants independently processed each speaker's perspective and compared them for efficient reference resolution (Experiment 2).

Conclusions:

• Perspective-taking in Mandarin bare noun resolution is a dynamic process, not a monolithic one.
• Findings suggest that comprehenders actively integrate and compare multiple perspectives to facilitate reference resolution in multiparty conversations.