Speaker-external versus speaker-internal forces on utterance form: do cognitive demands override threats to referential success?

To what extent do speaker-external communicative pressures versus speaker-internal cognitive pressures affect utterance form? Four experiments measured speakers' references to privately known (i.e., privileged) objects when naming mutually known (i.e., common ground) objects. Although speaker-external communicative pressures demanded that speakers avoid references to privileged objects, 2 experiments showed that speakers often ignored this demand when it coexisted with a speaker-internal pressure to attend to those privileged objects. The authors hypothesize that this was due to increased salience of privileged objects (a speaker-internal pressure). Experiment 3 showed that directly boosting the salience of privileged objects increased the likelihood that speakers will inappropriately refer to those objects. Experiment 4 showed that the salience-sensitive mechanism in Experiments 1 and 2 is likely related to the mechanism causing such references in Experiment 3. Thus, the language production system is especially sensitive to cognitive pressures even when communicative harm results.     

Speaker reliability guides children's inductive inferences about novel properties

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the current paper, we tested whether 3- and 5-year-old children attend to speaker reliability when they make inductive inferences about a non-obvious property of a novel artifact based on its label. Children were more likely to use a reliable speaker's label than an unreliable speaker's label when making inductive inferences. Thus, children not only prefer to learn from reliable speakers, they are also more likely to use information from reliable speakers as the basis for future inferences. The findings are discussed in light of the debate between a similarity-driven and a label-driven approach to inductive inferences.     

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.     

The eyes are right when the mouth is wrong

When describing visual scenes, speakers typically gaze at objects while preparing their names. In a study of the relation between eye movements and speech, a corpus of self-corrected speech errors was analyzed. If errors result from rushed word preparation, insufficient visual information, or failure to check prepared names against objects, speakers should spend less time gazing at referents before uttering errors than before uttering correct names. Counter to predictions, gazes to referents before errors (e.g., gazes to an axe before saying "ham-" [hammer]) highly resembled gazes to referents before correct names (e.g., gazes to an axe before saying "axe"). However, speakers gazed at referents for more time after initiating erroneous compared with correct names, apparently while they prepared corrections. Assuming that gaze nonetheless reflects word preparation, errors were not associated with insufficient preparation. Nor were errors systematically associated with decreased inspection of objects. Like gesture, gaze may accurately reflect a speaker's intentions even when the accompanying speech does not.     

Sonority constraints on onset-rime cohesion: evidence from native and bilingual Filipino readers of English

Research in English suggests that syllables can be analyzed in terms of two subunits-the onset (defined as the initial consonant or consonant cluster) and the rime (the unit formed by the vowel and following consonant/s). This study investigated whether nonnative readers of English, which in the case of the present study were native Filipino speakers, also make use of onset-rime units, particularly when some features of their native language (namely infixation and reduplication) appear to foster no awareness of such units. In two lexical decision experiments, monosyllabic English words were presented, divided in between their first and second consonants (e.g., B LIND), at their onset-rime boundary (e.g., BL IND), or at their antibody boundary (e.g., BLI ND). Results indicated that the processes of infixation and reduplication did not affect the English word processing of native Filipino speakers. Rather, results for both native Filipino and native English speakers suggest that onsets composed of an "s + consonant" sequence (e.g., STAMP) are less cohesive than onsets comprised of a stop-liquid sequence (e.g., BLIND). It was concluded that not only may sonority constraints underlie onset cohesiveness, but that such phonetic properties may also be involved in visual word recognition.     

Categorical congruence facilitates multisensory associative learning

Learning about objects often requires making arbitrary associations among multisensory properties, such as the taste and appearance of a food or the face and voice of a person. However, the multisensory properties of individual objects usually are statistically constrained, such that some properties are more likely to co-occur than others, on the basis of their category. For example, male faces are more likely to co-occur with characteristically male voices than with female voices. Here, we report evidence that these natural multisensory statistics play a critical role in the learning of novel, arbitrary associative pairs. In Experiment 1, we found that learning of pairs consisting of human voices and gender-congruent faces was superior to learning of pairs consisting of human voices and gender-incongruent faces or of pairs consisting of human voices and pictures of inanimate objects (plants and rocks). In Experiment 2, we found that this “categorical congruency” advantage extended to nonhuman stimuli, as well—namely, to pairs of class-congruent animal pictures and vocalizations (e.g., dogs and barks) versus class-incongruent pairs (e.g., dogs and bird chirps). These findings suggest that associating multisensory properties that are statistically consistent with the various objects that we encounter in our daily lives is a privileged form of learning.     

Semantic and phonological information flow in the production lexicon

When speakers produce words, lexical access proceeds through semantic and phonological levels of processing. If phonological processing begins based on partial semantic information, processing is cascaded; otherwise, it is discrete. In standard models of lexical access, semantically processed words exert phonological effects only if processing is cascaded. In 3 experiments, speakers named pictures of objects with homophone names (ball), while auditory distractor words were heard beginning 150 ms prior to picture onset. Distractors speeded picture naming (compared with controls) only when related to the nondepicted meaning of the picture (e.g., dance), exhibiting an early phonological effect, thereby supporting the cascaded prediction. Distractors slowed picture naming when categorically (e.g., frisbee) related to the depicted picture meaning, but not when associatively (e.g., game) related to it. An interactive activation model is presented.     

Being forward not backward: lexical limits to masked priming

This study investigated whether masked priming is mediated by existing memory representations by determining whether nonwords targets would show repetition priming. To avoid the potential confound that nonword repetition priming would be obscured by a familiarity response bias, the standard lexical decision and naming tasks were modified to make targets unfamiliar. Participants were required to read a target string from right to left (i.e., "ECAF" should be read as "FACE") and then make a response. To examine if priming was based on lexical representations, repetition primes consisted of words when read forwards or backwards (e.g., "face", "ecaf") and nonwords (e.g., "pame", "emap"). Forward and backward primes were used to test if task instruction affected prime encoding. The lexical decision and naming tasks showed the same pattern of results: priming only occurred for forward primes with word targets (e.g., "face-ECAF"). Additional experiments to test if response priming affected the LDT indicated that the lexical status of the prime per se did not affect target responses. These results showed that the encoding of masked primes was unaffected by the novel task instruction and support the view that masked priming is due to the automatic triggering of pre-established computational processes based on stored information.     

Eye movements during the production of nouns and pronouns

Earlier research has established that speakers usually fixate the objects they name and that the viewing time for an object depends on the time necessary for object recognition and for the retrieval of its name. In three experiments, speakers produced pronouns and noun phrases to refer to new objects and to objects already known. Speakers looked less frequently and for shorter periods at the objects to be named when they had very recently seen or heard of these objects than when the objects were new. Looking rates were higher and viewing times longer in preparation of noun phrases than in preparation of pronouns. If it is assumed that there is a close relationship between eye gaze and visual attention, these results reveal (1) that speakers allocate less visual attention to given objects than to new ones and (2) that they allocate visual attention both less often and for shorter periods to objects they will refer to by a pronoun than to objects they will name in a full noun phrase. The experiments suggest that linguistic processing benefits, directly or indirectly, from allocation of visual attention to the referent object.     

Parallel processing of objects in a naming task

The authors investigated whether speakers who named several objects processed them sequentially or in parallel. Speakers named object triplets, arranged in a triangle, in the order left, right, and bottom object. The left object was easy or difficult to identify and name. During the saccade from the left to the right object, the right object shown at trial onset (the interloper) was replaced by a new object (the target), which the speakers named. Interloper and target were identical or unrelated objects, or they were conceptually unrelated objects with the same name (e.g., bat [animal] and [baseball] bat). The mean duration of the gazes to the target was shorter when interloper and target were identical or had the same name than when they were unrelated. The facilitatory effects of identical and homophonous interlopers were significantly larger when the left object was easy to process than when it was difficult to process. This interaction demonstrates that the speakers processed the left and right objects in parallel.     

Syntax and intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mind

Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a partially symmetric sentence (e.g., “John exchanged products with Susan”). The results revealed a tendency to treat the grammatical subject as acting more intentionally than the grammatical object. In Experiment 3 participants were encouraged to think about the events that such sentences typically refer to, and the tendency was significantly reduced. These results suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind concepts. More specifically, there may be two ways of determining intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias to treat grammatical subjects (but not objects) as intentional (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of the events typically described by a sentence.     

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.     

Visual determinants of preferred adjective order

In referential communication, speakers refer to a target object among a set of context objects. The NPs they produce are characterized by a canonical order of prenominal adjectives: The dimensions that are easiest to detect (e.g., absolute dimensions) are commonly placed closer to the noun than other dimensions (e.g., relative dimensions). This stands in stark contrast to the assumption that language production is an incremental process. According to this incremental-procedural view, the dimensions that are easiest to detect should be named first. In the present paper, an alternative account of the canonical order effect is presented, suggesting that the prenominal adjective ordering rules are a result of the perceptual analysis processes underlying the evaluation of distinctive target features. Analyses of speakers’ eye movements during referential communication (Experiment 1) and analyses of utterance formats produced under time pressure (Experiment 2) provide evidence for the suggested perceptual classification account.     

Induction from a single instance: formation of a novel category

This study examines whether preschoolers can use information from a known category to induce a characteristic attribute of a novel, contrasting category based on a single instance. We showed 32 four-year-olds three instances of a Given Category and one instance of a Target Category. These objects could vary along two attribute dimensions, such as color and shape. All instances of the Given Category shared identical values of one attribute (e.g., all were blue), but could have different values of the other attribute (e.g., a circle, a square, and a triangle). The single instance of the Target Category was different from the Given on both attribute dimensions (e.g., a red diamond). Children gave yes/no judgements as to whether additional objects were instances of the Target Category. There were two possible sources of information about the relevance of an attribute to classification: explicit (labeling) and implicit (variation in the Given Category). There were four conditions such that each source of information was either available or not. Both types of information were effective in eliciting inductions of the relevant kind of attribute and the characteristic value of this attribute in the novel category (explicit: p = .0004; implicit: p = .031). This suggests that children use an inductive bias that the instances of two related but distinct categories tend to be alike in the same way.     

Communicative functions of directional verbal probabilities: Speaker’s choice,listener’s inference,and reference points

Verbal probabilities have directional communicative functions, and most can be categorized as positive (e.g., “it is likely”) or negative (e.g., “it is doubtful”). We examined the communicative functions of verbal probabilities based on the reference point hypothesis According to this hypothesis, listeners are sensitive to and can infer a speaker’s reference points based on the speaker’s selected directionality. In four experiments (two of which examined speakers’ choice of directionality and two of which examined listeners’ inferences about a speaker’s reference point), we found that listeners could make inferences about speakers’ reference points based on the stated directionality of verbal probability. Thus, the directionality of verbal probabilities serves the communicative function of conveying information about a speaker’s reference point.     

Preschoolers favor the creator's label when reasoning about an artifact's function

The creator of an artifact, by virtue of having made the object, has privileged knowledge about its intended function. Do children recognize that the label an artifact's creator uses can convey this privileged information? 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with an object that looked like a member of one familiar artifact category, but which the speaker referred to with the label of a different familiar category (e.g. a key-like object was called a "spoon"). Children who heard the speaker refer to the object as something she made were more likely to assign its function on the basis of the anomalous label she used than those who heard it referred to as something the speaker found. Thus, even very young children expect a unique connection between the label the creator of an artifact uses and the function she intends it to have.     

Audience design affects acoustic reduction via production facilitation

In this article, we examine the hypothesis that acoustic variation (e.g., reduced vs. prominent forms) results from audience design. Bard et al. (Journal of Memory and Language 42:1-22, 2000) have argued that acoustic prominence is unaffected by the speaker's estimate of addressee knowledge, using paradigms that contrast speaker and addressee knowledge. This question was tested in a novel paradigm, focusing on the effects of addressees' feedback about their understanding of the speaker's intended message. Speakers gave instructions to addressees about where to place objects (e.g., the teapot goes on red). The addressee either anticipated the object, by picking it up before the instruction, or waited for the instruction. For anticipating addressees, speakers began speaking more quickly and pronounced the word the with shorter duration, demonstrating effects of audience design. However, no effects appeared on the head noun (e.g., teapot), as measured by duration, amplitude, and perceived intelligibility. These results are consistent with a mechanism in which evidence about addressee understanding facilitates production processes, as opposed to triggering particular acoustic forms.     

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.     

Induction with cross-classified categories

One of the main functions of categories is to allow inferences about new objects. However, most objects are cross-classified, and it is not known whether and how people combine information from these different categories in making inferences. In six experiments, food categories, which are strongly crossclassified (e.g., a bagel is both a bread and a breakfast food), were studied. For each food, the subjects were told fictitious facts (e.g., 75% of breads are subject to spoilage from Aspergillus molds) about two of the categories to which it belonged and then were asked to make an inference about the food (e.g., how likely is a bagel to be subject to spoilage from Aspergillus molds?). We found no more use of multiple categories in these cases of cross-classification than in ambiguous classification, in which it is uncertain to which category an item belongs. However, some procedural manipulations did markedly increase the use of both categories in inferences, primarily those that focused the subjects’ attention on the critical feature in both categories.