Scalar reference, contrast and discourse: Separating effects of linguistic discourse from availability of the referent

Abstract

Listeners expect that a definite noun phrase with a pre-nominal scalar adjective (e.g., the big …) will refer to an entity that is part of a set of objects contrasting on the scalar dimension, e.g., size (Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers & Carlson, 1999). Two visual world experiments demonstrate that uttering a referring expression with a scalar adjective makes all members of the relevant contrast set more salient in the discourse model, facilitating subsequent reference to other members of that contrast set. Moreover, this discourse effect is caused primarily by linguistic mention of a scalar adjective and not by the listener’s prior visual or perceptual experience. These experiments demonstrate that language processing is sensitive to which information was introduced by linguistic mention, and that the visual world paradigm can be use to tease apart the separate contributions of visual and linguistic information to reference resolution.

Is anaphoric reference cooperative?

“…Our results are also in line with the study of Wolter et al (2011) in which they demonstrated separate effects of linguistic and non-linguistic information in reference resolution. They showed that the mention of a scalar adjective in the description of an object (e.g., a tall candle) facilitated subsequent reference to objects that were contrasted with the adjective (e.g., a small candle) whereas no such facilitation occured in cases in which participants attended to the same objects but no scalar adjectives were used in the description.…”

“…Interestingly, Wolter, Skovbroten Gorman, and Tanenhaus (2011) demonstrated that in language comprehension, linguistic and non-linguistic information made separate contributions to reference resolution. Their participants moved objects in a visual display according to instructions while their eye movements were recorded.…”

Activation of negated and non-negated entities

“…In the AND condition, there is no contrast between the two concepts because they are both non-negated, but in the NOT condition, the negation of Noun2 creates an inherent contrast between the two concepts (i.e., one concept is selected and the other is not). Research has shown that when one member of a contrast set is mentioned, the other member of the contrast set is activated as well (Wolter et al, 2011). Therefore, when the negation increases the activation of Noun2 as hypothesized, it may also be increasing the activation of the contrasted Noun1, causing a similar increase in references relative to the AND condition.…”

“…As previously discussed, this effect may be the result of the contrast implicit in the NOT condition and made explicit by the word but. When one item in a contrastive set increases in activation, this activation also spreads to the other item in the set (Wolter et al, 2011). Therefore, when Noun2 increases in activation, either through additional processing required to comprehend non-licensed negation (Experiments 1a and 1b) or through repetition of the concept (Experiment 2), the activation level of Noun1 also increases.…”

Similarity-based competition in relative clause production and comprehension

“…Assuming that the extent to which competitors are fixated reflects their degree of activation in the speaker s mind, as implicitly assumed in eye-tracking studies (Huettig & Hartsuiker, 2008;Wolter, Gorman, & Tanenhaus, 2011), we would expect relatively fewer fixations on agents in animate-head passives compared to inanimate-head passives, due to similarity-based mechanisms in the former but not the latter. That is, in competitive situations (animate-head targets), the agent is relatively less activated due to interference with the target, compared to non-competitive situations (inanimate-head targets), although it should still be more active than unrelated entities, as utterance-relevant characters are.…”