The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts☆

Abstract

Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names in speaking. Such choices are traditionally attributed to speakers striving to make referring expressions maximally interpretable to addressees. The experiments revealed a novel effect: even when a pronoun would not be ambiguous, the presence of another character in the discourse decreased pronoun use and increased latencies to refer to the most prominent character in the discourse. In other words, speakers were more likely to call Minnie Minnie than shewhen Donald was also present. Even when the referent character appeared alone in the stimulus picture, the presence of another character in the preceding discourse reduced pronouns. Furthermore, pronoun use varied with features associated with the speaker's degree of focus on the preceding discourse (e.g., narrative style and disfluency). We attribute this effect to competition for attentional resources in the speaker's representation of the discourse. Keywords language production; discourse; reference; pronouns; word selection; proper names When people talk, they refer to things. They constantly make rapid decisions about whether an expression should be explicit, like Michelle Bacheletor the first female president in Chile, or whether it should be relatively underspecified, like she. In this paper we examine the production processes involved in the choice between less specific expressions, like pronouns, and more explicit expressions, like proper names.Research on this issue has primarily focused on the aspects of discourse that constrain speakers' choices in referring expressions, and in particular, the linguistic discourse history. The standard approach assumes that a speaker's task is to pick a referring expression that maximally fits the current discourse situation, so as to make it easy for the listener to interpret. An explicit formulation of this idea is offered by Chafe (1994), "If language is to function effectively, a speaker is obliged to categorize a shared referent in a way that allows the listener to identify it" (p. 97). Similarly, Gundel and colleagues (1993) state, "the form of referring expressions… Corresponding author: Dr. Jennifer Arnold, UNC Chapel Hill, Dept. of Psychology, CB#3270 Davie Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270, Email: jarnold@email.unc.edu. This research was partially funded by NIH grants HD-41522 to J. Arnold and MH61318-01 to Z. Griffin, as well as NSF grant BCS-0318456 to Z. Griffin.Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Aut...

Effects of Reference Form on Frequency of Mentionand Rate of Pronominalization

“…In the story-continuation experiments presented in this paper, both subject and target referents were semantically human. Different studies (Arnold & Griffin 2007) showed that the presence of multiple referents in a discourse reduces the use of less specified types of referring expressions to refer back to one of them. Even though the participants in the experiment reported here could have opted for more reduced types of referring expressions, as there was no competition between the referents in terms of gender (except for TI1 in Table (1)), they nevertheless chose more specified types of referring expressions (i.e.…”

Integrating mechanisms of visual guidance in naturalistic language production

“…This has been the most studied aspect of situated production in previous work (e.g., Griffin & Bock, 2000). Referential ambiguity is known to cause interference when producing referring expressions (Arnold & Griffin, 2007;Fukumura, Van Gompel, & Pickering, 2010); and it can be successfully resolved if detected before the production starts (Ferreira, Slevc, & Rogers, 2007). Referential competition and ambiguity resolution strategies are indexed by visual responses; here we focus on the latency of last fixation on the target object before it is mentioned.…”

“…On one hand, there is evidence that perceptual factors are involved in selecting referential information for sentence processing (e.g., Arnold & Griffin, 2007;Gleitman, January, Nappa, & Trueswell, 2007;Papafragou, Hulbert, & Trueswell, 2008; see also Myachykov, Thompson, Scheepers, & Garrod, 2011, for a review). On the other hand, there is also evidence for sentence processing mechanisms which explain how eye-movements and speech responses are linked (Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998;Griffin & Bock, 2000;Bock, Irwin, Davidson, & Levelt, 2003;Qu & Chai, 2008;Kuchinksy, Bock, & Irwin, 2011).…”

7. Reference and Informativeness as cognitive processes in verbal communication

“…As a result of this, full comparison activity between the target and the nonreferents may be sacrificed, leading to greater overspecification. Such an account is put forward by Koolen et al (2011) who found plural targets REs to be more frequently overspecified than single target REs, and similarly by Arnold and Griffin (2007) who found more full NP expressions than appropriate pronominal expressions to plural targets.…”