Overinformative Speakers Are Cooperative: Revisiting the Gricean Maxim of Quantity

A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language‐production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce redundant color adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative.     

Effects of referential ambiguity,time constraints and addressee orientation on the production of morphologically complex words

In five experiments, participants were asked to describe unambiguously a target picture in a picture–picture paradigm. In the same-category condition, target (e.g., water bucket) and distractor picture (e.g., ice bucket) had identical names when their preferred, morphologically simple, name was used (e.g., bucket). The ensuing lexical ambiguity could be resolved by compound use (e.g., water bucket). Simple names sufficed as means of specification in other conditions, with distractors identical to the target, completely unrelated, or geometric figures. With standard timing parameters, participants produced mainly ambiguous answers in Experiment 1. An increase in available processing time hardly improved unambiguous responding (Experiment 2). A referential communication instruction (Experiment 3) increased the number of compound responses considerably, but morphologically simple answers still prevailed. Unambiguous responses outweighed ambiguous ones in Experiment 4, when timing parameters were further relaxed. Finally, the requirement to name both objects resulted in a nearly perfect ambiguity resolution (Experiment 5). Together, the results showed that speakers overcome lexical ambiguity only when time permits, when an addressee perspective is given and, most importantly, when their own speech overtly signals the ambiguity.     

Communicative Context Affects Use of Referential Prosody

The current study assessed the extent to which the use of referential prosody varies with communicative demand. Speaker–listener dyads completed a referential communication task during which speakers attempted to indicate one of two color swatches (one bright, one dark) to listeners. Speakers' bright sentences were reliably higher pitched than dark sentences for ambiguous (e.g., bright red versus dark red) but not unambiguous (e.g., bright red versus dark purple) trials, suggesting that speakers produced meaningful acoustic cues to brightness when the accompanying linguistic content was underspecified (e.g., “Can you get the red one?”). Listening partners reliably chose the correct corresponding swatch for ambiguous trials when lexical information was insufficient to identify the target, suggesting that listeners recruited prosody to resolve lexical ambiguity. Prosody can thus be conceptualized as a type of vocal gesture that can be recruited to resolve referential ambiguity when there is communicative demand to do so.     

Adjective–noun order as representational structure: Native-language grammar influences perception of similarity and recognition memory

This article describes two experiments linking native-language grammar rules with implications for perception of similarity and recognition memory. In prenominal languages (e.g., English), adjectives usually precede nouns, whereas in postnominal languages (e.g., Portuguese), nouns usually precede adjectives. We explored the influence of such rules upon similarity judgments about, and recognition of, objects with multiple category attributes (one nominal attribute and one adjectival attribute). The results supported the hypothesized primacy effect of native-language word order such that nouns generally carried more weight for Portuguese speakers than for English speakers. This pattern was observed for judgments of similarity (i.e., Portuguese speakers tended to judge objects that shared a noun-designated attribute as more similar than did English speakers), as well as for false alarms in recognition memory (i.e., Portuguese speakers tended to falsely recognize more objects if they possessed a familiar noun attribute, relative to English speakers). The implications of such linguistic effects for the cognition of similarity and memory are discussed.     

Perceptual processing of nontargets in an attention task

The capability of nontargets to qualitatively influence the semantic processing of coincident targets was investigated in three experiments. Subjects were aurally presented a series of word pairs and attempted to detect homonymic instances of a predesignated category (e.g., animals). The nontarget with which a target (e.g., ANT) was paired was appropriate (e.g., CRAWLING), inappropriate (e.g., UNCLE), or neutral (e.g., STRAW). Experiments 1 and 2 established that detection of targets can be facilitated by appropriate nontargets and inhibited by inappropriate ones. Thus, nontargets can influence the way in which targets are semantically represented. Experiment 3 showed that this effect is eliminated when subjects are precued as to the ear of entry of targets. Thus, precuing appears to curtail the perceptual processing of nontargets. The data run counter to theories that claim that focused attention does not entail the perceptual suppression of nontargets.     

Syllable onsets are perceptual reading units

Syllable onsets are defined as the initial consonant or consonant cluster in a syllable (e.g., BR in BREAD). In the present study, using a letter detection paradigm and French words, we tested whether syllable onsets are processed as units by the reading system. In Experiment 1, we replicated Gross, Treiman, and Inman's (2000) result of observing no difference between the detection latencies of letters embedded in a multi-letter syllable onset (e.g., c in ECLATER) relative to a single-letter syllable onset (e.g., C in ECARTER). In Experiment 2, participants took longer to detect the target letter when it was in the second position of a multi-letter onset (e.g., L in TABLIER) than when it was a single-letter onset (e.g., L in ECOLIER). In Experiment 3, this position effect was replicated for graphemes. In Experiment 4, we tested and ruled out an alternative explanation of the unitization effect, in terms of lateral masking. These results indicate that syllable onsets are processed as perceptual units by the reading system and that the unitization effect is position dependent.     

Flanker and Simon effects interact at the response selection stage

The present study aimed at investigating the processing stage underlying stimulus–stimulus (S–S) congruency effects by examining the relation of a particular type of congruency effect (i.e., the flanker effect) with a stimulus–response (S–R) spatial correspondence effect (i.e., the Simon effect). Experiment 1 used a unilateral flanker task in which the flanker also acted as a Simon-like accessory stimulus. Results showed a significant S–S Congruency × S–R Correspondence interaction: An advantage for flanker–response spatially corresponding trials was observed in target–flanker congruent conditions, whereas, in incongruent conditions, there was a noncorresponding trials' advantage. The analysis of the temporal trend of the correspondence effects ruled out a temporal-overlap account for the observed interaction. Moreover, results of Experiment 2, in which the flanker did not belong to the target set, demonstrated that this interaction cannot be attributed to perceptual grouping of the target–flanker pairs and referential coding of the target with respect to the flanker in the congruent and incongruent conditions, respectively. Taken together, these findings are consistent with a response selection account of congruency effects: Both the position and the task-related attribute of the flanker would activate the associated responses. In noncorresponding-congruent trials and corresponding-incongruent trials, this would cause a conflict at the response selection stage.     

What we know about what we have never heard: evidence from perceptual illusions

Are speakers equipped with preferences concerning grammatical structures that are absent in their language? We examine this question by investigating the sensitivity of English speakers to the sonority of onset clusters. Linguistic research suggests that certain onset clusters are universally preferred (e.g., bd>lb). We demonstrate that such preferences modulate the perception of unattested onsets by English speakers: Monosyllabic auditory nonwords with onsets that are universally dispreferred (e.g., lbif) are more likely to be classified as disyllabic and misperceived as identical to their disyllabic counterparts (e.g., lebif) compared to onsets that are relatively preferred across languages (e.g., bdif). Consequently, dispreferred onsets benefit from priming by their epenthetic counterpart (e.g., lebif-lbif) as much as they benefit from identity priming (e.g., lbif-lbif). A similar pattern of misperception (e.g., lbif-->lebif) was observed among speakers of Russian, where clusters of this type occur. But unlike English speakers, Russian speakers perceived these clusters accurately on most trials, suggesting that the perceptual illusions of English speakers are partly due to their linguistic experience, rather than phonetic confusion alone. Further evidence against a purely phonetic explanation for our results is offered by the capacity of English speakers to perceive such onsets accurately under conditions that encourage precise phonetic encoding. The perceptual illusions of English speakers are also irreducible to several statistical properties of the English lexicon. The systematic misperception of universally dispreferred onsets might reflect their ill-formedness in the grammars of all speakers, irrespective of linguistic experience. Such universal grammatical preferences implicate constraints on language learning.     

Appearances aren't everything: shape classifiers and referential processing in Cantonese

Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier tiu occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3 experiments, we explored how the semantic information encoded in shape classifiers influences language comprehension. When judging the fit between classifiers and depicted objects in an explicit ranking task, Cantonese speakers evaluated classifier-noun pairings solely in terms of grammatical well-formedness and showed no separate sensitivity to the shape features of objects. In an eye-tracking task (Experiment 2), we also found little sensitivity to shape classifier semantics during real-time comprehension. However, in a subsequent experiment in which referent objects lacked the prototypical features for their accompanying classifiers (Experiment 3), an influence of shape semantics was found in participants' incidental fixations to nontarget objects. We conclude that shape classifiers influence referential interpretation primarily through their grammatical constraints, consistent with the agreementlike nature of classifiers in general. The role of shape classifiers' semantics on processing is apparent only in specific circumstances.     

In search of perceptual influences of sentence context on word recognition

A major issue in the study of word perception concerns the nature (perceptual or nonperceptual) of sentence context effects. The authors compared effects of legal, word replacement, nonword replacement, and transposed contexts on target word performance using the Reicher-Wheeler task to suppress nonperceptual influences of contextual and lexical constraint. Experiment 1 showed superior target word performance for legal (e.g., "it began to flap/flop") over all other contexts and for transposed over word replacement and nonword replacement contexts. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with higher constraint contexts (e.g., "the cellar is dark/dank") and Experiment 3 showed that strong constraint contexts improved performance for congruent (e.g., "born to be wild") but not incongruent (e.g., mild) target words. These findings support the view that the very perception of words can be enhanced when words are presented in legal sentence contexts.     

Perception and presupposition in real-time language comprehension: insights from anticipatory processing

Recent studies have shown that listeners use verbs and other predicate terms to anticipate reference to semantic entities during real-time language comprehension. This process involves evaluating the denoted action against relevant properties of potential referents. The current study explored whether action-relevant properties are readily available to comprehension systems as a result of the embodied nature of linguistic and conceptual representations. In three experiments, eye movements were monitored as listeners followed instructions to move depicted objects on a computer screen. Critical instructions contained the verb return (e.g., Now return the block to area 3), which presupposes the previous displacement of its complement object--a property that is not reflected in perceptible or stable characteristics of objects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that predictions for previously displaced objects are generated upon hearing return, ruling out the possibility that anticipatory effects draw directly on static affordances in perceptual symbols. Experiment 2 used a referential communication task to evaluate how communicative relevance constrains the use of perceptually derived information. Results showed that listeners anticipate previously displaced objects as candidates upon hearing return only when their displacement was known to the speaker. Experiment 3 showed that the outcome of the original act of displacement further modulates referential predictions. The results show that the use of perceptually grounded information in language interpretation is subject to communicative constraints, even when language denotes physical actions performed on concrete objects.     

Does sunshine prime loyal? Affective priming in the naming task

Recent work has found an affective priming effect using the naming task: In pronouncing target words, pronunciation latencies were consistently shorter when the target (e.g., loyal) was preceded by an evaluatively congruent (e.g., sunshine) rather than incongruent prime word (e.g, rain). Using the naming task, no affective priming was found in the present studies irrespective of prime-set size and target-set size (Experiment 1), irrespective of stimulus-onset asynchrony (Experiment 2), and even when a nearly exact replication of previous work that demonstrated the effect was conducted (Experiment 3). Finally, bilingual German/English speakers exhibited strong associative priming, but no affective priming, in both the English as well as the German language (Experiment 4). The results show that priming for evaluatively related words is not a general finding.     

Perceptual dimensions differentiate emotions

Individuals often describe objects in their world in terms of perceptual dimensions that span a variety of modalities; the visual (e.g., brightness: dark–bright), the auditory (e.g., loudness: quiet–loud), the gustatory (e.g., taste: sour–sweet), the tactile (e.g., hardness: soft vs. hard) and the kinaesthetic (e.g., speed: slow–fast). We ask whether individuals use perceptual dimensions to differentiate emotions from one another. Participants in two studies (one where respondents reported on abstract emotion concepts and a second where they reported on specific emotion episodes) rated the extent to which features anchoring 29 perceptual dimensions (e.g., temperature, texture and taste) are associated with 8 emotions (anger, fear, sadness, guilt, contentment, gratitude, pride and excitement). Results revealed that in both studies perceptual dimensions differentiate positive from negative emotions and high arousal from low arousal emotions. They also differentiate among emotions that are similar in arousal and valence (e.g., high arousal negative emotions such as anger and fear). Specific features that anchor particular perceptual dimensions (e.g., hot vs. cold) are also differentially associated with emotions.     

Visual selective attention with virtual barriers

Previous studies have shown that interference effects in the flanker task are reduced when physical barriers (e.g., hands) are placed around rather than below a target flanked by distractors. One explanation of this finding is the referential coding hypothesis, whereby the barriers serve as reference objects for allocating attention. In five experiments, the generality of the referential coding hypothesis was tested by investigating whether interference effects are modulated by the placement of virtual barriers (e.g., parentheses). Modulation of flanker interference was found only when target and distractors differed in size and the virtual barriers were beveled wood-grain objects. Under these conditions and those of previous studies, the author conjectures that an impression of depth was produced when the barriers were around the target, such that the target was perceived to be on a different depth plane than the distractors. Perception of depth in the stimulus display might have led to referential coding of the stimuli in three-dimensional (3-D) space, influencing the allocation of attention beyond the horizontal and vertical dimensions. This 3-D referential coding hypothesis is consistent with research on selective attention in 3-D space that shows flanker interference is reduced when target and distractors are separated in depth.     

Perceptual and semantic sources of category-specific effects: event-related potentials during picture and word categorization

In two experiments the effect of object category on event-related potentials (ERPs) was assessed while subjects performed superordinate categorizations with pictures and words referring to objects from natural (e.g., animal) and artifactual (e.g., tool) categories. First, a category probe was shown that was presented as name in Experiment 1 and as picture in Experiment 2. Thereafter, the target stimulus was displayed. In both experiments, analyses of the ERPs to the targets revealed effects of category at about 160 msec after target onset in the pictorial modality, which can be attributed to category-specific differences in perceptual processing. Later, between about 300-500 msec, natural and artifactual categories elicited similar ERP effects across target and category modalities. These findings suggest that perceptual as well as semantic sources contribute to category-specific effects. They support the view that semantic knowledge associated with different categories is represented in multiple subsystems that are similarly accessed by pictures and words.     

Prenominal adjective order and visual discrimination in children

Preschool and third-grade children heard prenominal adjective phrases describing an object. Each phrase contained an article, two adjectives and a head noun. The phrases were constructed with either normal or inverted adjective order. Either after a one second delay or immediately following phrase presentation, Subjects were shown pictures of two objects. One of the objects (target) depicted the object described in the noun phrase. The other object differed from the target along the dimensions of color, size, or both color and size. The Subject's task was to select the target object. It was predicted that adjective order would influence perceptual strategies used by the Subjects in the visual discrimination task. Analysis of response time scores showed that adjective order interacted with the relevant discriminative stimuli in the discrimination task. These results were interpreted as support for hypotheses that suggest that linguistic organization can constrain conceptual processing involving nonlinguistic information. The effects of the delay condition provided additional evidence for these hypotheses plus support for an arousal hypothesis.     

Anticipating who will say what: The influence of speaker-specific memory associations on reference resolution

Some accounts of common ground assume that successful communication requires detailed consideration of others’ knowledge. In two studies, we provide evidence for an alternative account that views common ground as being mediated in part through domain-general memory mechanisms. On each trial, participants heard prerecorded instructions from one of two speakers indicating which of two displayed pictures to select. During an initial association phase, each speaker repeatedly referred to different sets of pictures. In Experiment 1, we contrasted a “between-speaker mapping” condition, in which each speaker referred to only one picture from critical item pairs (e.g., the cat drinking milk vs. the cat sitting up), and a “within-speaker mapping” condition, in which each speaker referred to both pictures within each pair, although item categories differed across speakers. On subsequent test trials, we recorded participants' eye fixations to critical displays that included both items from a category pair. Prior to the linguistic point of disambiguation, participants in the between-speaker mapping condition were more likely to fixate on the picture previously described by the current speaker, suggesting that knowledge associated with the speaker was prompting expectations for which picture would be the intended target. In Experiment 2, we used two prerecorded speakers of the same gender to strengthen the claim that the relevant implicit memory associations are speaker-specific. These results demonstrate how domain-general memory associations can be an important constraint upon language use.     

The interaction between social saliency and perceptual saliency

The ability to select visual targets in hierarchical stimuli can be affected by both perceptual saliency and social saliency. However, the functional relations between the effects are not understood. Here we examined whether these two factors interact or combine in an additive way. Participants first learnt to associate geometric shapes with three people (e.g., triangle–self, square–stranger). After learning the associations, participants were presented with compound stimuli (e.g., a global triangle formed by a set of local squares) and had to select a target at the global or local level. In Experiment 1 the task was to identify the person associated with the local or global shape. In Experiment 2 the task was simply to identify the shape. We manipulated perceptual saliency by blurring local elements to form perceptually global salient stimuli or by contrasting the colours of neighbouring local elements (red vs. white) to form perceptually local salient stimuli. In Experiment 1 (person discrimination) there was a strong effect of saliency on local targets (there were faster and more accurate responses to high than to low saliency targets) when social and perceptual saliency occurred at same level. However, both perceptual and social saliency effects were eliminated when the effect of saliency at one level competed with that at the other level. In Experiment 2 (shape discrimination), there were only effects of perceptual saliency. The data indicate that social saliency interacts with perceptual saliency when explicit social categorizations are made, consistent with both factors modulating a common process of visual selection.