People as Contexts in Conversation

Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

“…Instead, the current results –in particular, Experiments 2 and 4—provide further evidence that listeners can learn and store (at least for the period of an experiment) linguistic experiences along with rich knowledge about the context these experienced occurred in. This result is in line with memory-based accounts (Goldinger, 1996; K Johnson, 1997; Pierrehumbert, 2001) that consider talkers to be part of the contextual information that linguistic experiences are stored with (for further discussion, see Brown-Schmidt et al, 2015; Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015). The memory processes evoked by these accounts are taken to be typically automatic and implicit (see also Horton & Gerrig, 2005).…”

“…This result extends previous evidence for talker-specific lexical expectations from open class words (e.g., Creel et al, 2008; Metzing & Brennan, 2003; also Walker & Hay, 2011). These results are expected under episodic, exemplar-based, and other memory-based alignment accounts (Brown-Schmidt et al, 2015; Horton & Gerrig, 2005; Johnson, 1997; Pierrehumbert, 2011) as well as the rational adaptor account (Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015), but not lexical priming accounts.…”

“…The comparison of Experiments 2a and 2b further suggests that exposure to the quantifier use of a specific talker primarily leads to adapted expectation about that listener: when we removed uncertainty about whether participants were asked about the specific exposure talker (Experiment 2b), the adaptation effect (measured here as Cohen’s D) doubled . Taken together, Experiments 2a and 2b thus provide evidence that listeners store lexical experiences along with information about the context in which they occur and that this context includes the talker (Horton & Gerrig, 2005; Brown-Schmidt et al, 2015). This result extends previous evidence for talker-specific lexical expectations from open class words (e.g., Creel et al, 2008; Metzing & Brennan, 2003; also Walker & Hay, 2011).…”

“…(Similar reasoning applies to Bayesian models of adaptation that assume generative processes over hierarchically organized indexical alignment, Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015.) Similarly, memory-based models of lexical alignment (Horton & Gerrig, 2005, 2015) can in theory account for both talker-specific expectations –if talkers are included as contexts (Brown-Schmidt, Yoon, & Ryskin, 2015). …”

What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension?

“…However, a comprehender’s specific goal will depend on the particular situation. During everyday conversation, it will often be to discern the producer’s underlying intention as conveyed by speech acts (see Brown-Schmidt, Yoon, & Ryskin, 2015; Levinson, 2003; Yoon, Koh, & Brown-Schmidt, 2012 for discussion), and there are now several studies using the visual real-world paradigm showing that the presence or absence of anticipatory eye movements can be influenced by multiple different types of information in both the discourse and non-verbal context, which can cue comprehenders towards carrying out the particular action that the producer intended them to produce (see Salverda et al, 2011; Tanenhaus, Chambers, & Hanna, 2004; Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 2006 for discussion and reviews). For example, Chambers, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson (2004) asked participants to act on spoken instructions like “Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour”, and showed that anticipatory eye movements, which reflected participants syntactic parse of the sentence, were influenced by whether or not there were pourable liquid eggs in a bowl (versus solid eggs in a bowl that were not pourable).…”