Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation

Adaptation at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: Evidence From a Vernacular Structure

Expanding on psycholinguistic research on linguistic adaptation, the phenomenon whereby speakers change how they comprehend or produce structures as a result of cumulative exposure to less frequent or unfamiliar linguistic structures, this study asked whether speakers can learn semantic and syntactic properties of the American English vernacular negative auxiliary inversion (NAI) structure (e.g., didn't everybody eat, meaning "not everybody ate") during the course of an experiment. Formal theoretical analyses of NAI informed the design of a task in which American English-speaking participants unfamiliar with this structure were exposed to NAI sentences in either semantically ambiguous or unambiguous contexts. Participants rapidly adapted to the interpretive properties of NAI, selecting responses similar to what would be expected of a native speaker after only limited exposure to semantically ambiguous input. On a separate ratings task, participants displayed knowledge of syntactic restrictions on NAI subject type, despite having no previous exposure. We discuss the results in the context of other experimental studies of adaptation and suggest the implementation of top-down strategies via analogy to other familiar structure types as possible explanations for the behaviors observed in this study. The study illustrates the value of integrating insights from formal theoretical research and psycholinguistic methods in research on adaptation and highlights the need for more interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work in both experimental and naturalistic contexts to understand this phenomenon.

Questions About Quantifiers: Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Quantity Processing by the Brain

One approach to understanding how the human cognitive system stores and operates with quantifiers such as "some," "many," and "all" is to investigate their interaction with the cognitive mechanisms for estimating and comparing quantities from perceptual input (i.e., nonsymbolic quantities). While a potential link between quantifier processing and nonsymbolic quantity processing has been considered in the past, it has never been discussed extensively. Simultaneously, there is a long line of research within the field of numerical cognition on the relationship between processing exact number symbols (such as "3" or "three") and nonsymbolic quantity. This accumulated knowledge can potentially be harvested for research on quantifiers since quantifiers and number symbols are two different ways of referring to quantity information symbolically. The goal of the present review is to survey the research on the relationship between quantifiers and nonsymbolic quantity processing mechanisms and provide a set of research directions and specific questions for the investigation of quantifier processing.

Semantic Adaptation to the Interpretation of Gradable Adjectives via Active Linguistic Interaction

When communicating, people adapt their linguistic representations to those of their interlocutors. Previous studies have shown that this also occurs at the semantic level for vague and context-dependent terms such as quantifiers and uncertainty expressions. However, work to date has mostly focused on passive exposure to a given speaker's interpretation, without considering the possible role of active linguistic interaction. In this study, we focus on gradable adjectives big and small and develop a novel experimental paradigm that allows participants to ask clarification questions to figure out their interlocutor's interpretation. We find that, when in doubt, speakers do resort to this strategy, despite its inherent cognitive cost, and that doing so results in higher semantic alignment measured in terms of communicative success. While not all question-answer pairs are equally informative, we show that speakers become better questioners as the interaction progresses. Yet, the higher semantic alignment observed when speakers are able to ask questions does not increase over time. This suggests that conversational interaction's key advantage may be to boost coordination without committing to long-term semantic updates. Our findings shed new light on the mechanisms used by speakers to achieve semantic alignment and on how language is shaped by communication.

Uncovering the Structure of Semantic Representations Using a Computational Model of Decision-Making

According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague concepts. For a case study, we selected two natural language quantifiers most and more than half. We conducted two online experiments, each with 90 native English speakers. In the first experiment, we tested between-subjects variability in meaning representations. In the second experiment, we tested the stability of meaning representations over time by testing the same group of participants in two experimental sessions. In both experiments, participants performed the verification task. They verified a sentence with a quantifier (e.g., "Most of the gleerbs are feezda.") based on the numerical information provided in the second sentence, (e.g., "60% of the gleerbs are feezda"). To investigate between-subject and within-subject differences in meaning representations, we proposed an extended version of the Diffusion Decision Model with two parameters capturing truth conditions and vagueness. We fit the model to responses and reaction times data. In the first experiment, we found substantial between-subject differences in representations of most as reflected by the variability in the truth conditions. Moreover, we found that the verification of most is proportion-dependent as reflected in the reaction time effect and model parameter. In the second experiment, we showed that quantifier representations are stable over time as reflected in stable model parameters across two experimental sessions. These findings challenge semantic theories that assume the truth-conditional equivalence of most and more than half and contribute to the representational theory of vague concepts. The current study presents a promising approach to study semantic representations, which can have a wide application in experimental linguistics.

Speaker-Specific Cues Influence Semantic Disambiguation

Addressees use information from specific speakers' previous discourse to make predictions about incoming linguistic material and to restrict the choice of potential interpretations. In this way, speaker specificity has been shown to be an influential factor in language processing across several domains e.g., spoken word recognition, sentence processing, and pragmatics. However, its influence on semantic disambiguation has received little attention to date. Using an exposure-test design and visual world eye tracking, we examined the effect of speaker-specific literal vs. nonliteral style on the disambiguation of metaphorical polysemes such as 'fork', 'head', and 'mouse'. Eye movement data revealed that when interpreting polysemous words with a literal and a nonliteral meaning, addressees showed a late-stage preference for the literal meaning in response to a nonliteral speaker. We interpret this as reflecting an indeterminacy in the intended meaning in this condition, as well as the influence of meaning dominance cues at later stages of processing. Response data revealed that addressees then ultimately resolved to the literal target in 90% of trials. These results suggest that addressees consider a range of senses in the earlier stages of processing, and that speaker style is a contextual determinant in semantic processing.

Interlocutor modelling in comprehending speech from interleaved interlocutors of different dialectic backgrounds

It has been shown that, in language comprehension, listeners model certain attributes of their interlocutor (e.g., dialectic background, age, gender) and interpret speech against that model; for example, they understand cross-dialectally ambiguous words such as flat and gas for their American English (AE) meanings more often when listening to an AE interlocutor than a British English (BE) interlocutor. This study further investigated whether listeners construct concurrent interlocutor models when communicating with interleaved interlocutors of different dialectic backgrounds, and, if they do, how they choose between concurrent models to interpret words. In two experiments, participants heard a word (e.g., flat) spoken by a BE or AE interlocutor and provided a word associate (indicating which meaning of the word was accessed). When different interlocutors were encountered in separate blocks, participants accessed more AE meanings when listening to an AE rather than a BE interlocutor, and the accent effect was not larger for words pronounced more differently in BE and AE (e.g., fall sounds more distinctly British vs. American than flat does). These results suggest that participants constructed an interlocutor model (e.g., of a BE or an AE speaker) and used it (instead of accent details in a word) to guide word meaning access. When interlocutors were interleaved in the same block, we observed a comparable accent effect, which increased as a function of between-accent differences in pronunciation. These results suggest that participants constructed concurrent interlocutor models and used accent details in a word to select the appropriate interlocutor model. We also observed that the accent effect was comparable for two interleaved interlocutors of the same gender (e.g., a female BE interlocutor and a female AE interlocutor) and for two interleaved interlocutors of different genders (e.g., a female BE interlocutor and a male AE interlocutor). These results suggest that participants did not use gender-related voice details for model selection when accent details were sufficient for interlocutor model selection.

I know what you're probably going to say: Listener adaptation to variable use of uncertainty expressions

Pragmatic theories of utterance interpretation share the assumption that listeners reason about alternative utterances that a speaker could have produced, but didn't. For such reasoning to be successful, listeners must have precise expectations about a speaker's production choices. This is at odds with the considerable variability across speakers that exists at all levels of linguistic representation. This tension can be reconciled by listeners adapting to the statistics of individual speakers. While linguistic adaptation is increasingly widely attested, semantic/pragmatic adaptation is underexplored. Moreover, what kind of representations listeners update during semantic/pragmatic adaptation - estimates of the speaker's lexicon, or estimates of the speaker's utterance preferences - remains poorly understood. In this work, we investigate semantic/pragmatic adaptation in the domain of uncertainty expressions like might and probably. In a series of web-based experiments, we find 1) that listeners vary in their expectations about a generic speaker's use of uncertainty expressions; 2) that listeners rapidly update their expectations about the use of uncertainty expressions after brief exposure to a speaker with a specific usage of uncertainty expressions; and 3) that listeners' interpretations of uncertainty expressions change after being exposed to a specific speaker. We present a novel computational model of semantic/pragmatic adaptation based on Bayesian belief updating and show, through a series of model comparisons, that semantic/pragmatic adaptation is best captured by listeners updating their beliefs both about the speaker's lexicon and their utterance preferences. This work has implications for both semantic theories of uncertainty expressions and psycholinguistic theories of adaptation: it highlights the need for dynamic semantic representations and suggests that listeners integrate their general linguistic knowledge with speaker-specific experiences to arrive at more precise interpretations.

Presuppositions of determiners are immediately used to disambiguate utterance meaning: A mouse-tracking study on the German language

The present study investigated how listeners understand and process the definite and the indefinite determiner. While the definite determiner clearly conveys a uniqueness presupposition, the status of the anti-uniqueness inference associated with the indefinite determiner is less clear. In a forced choice production task, we observed that participants make use of the information about number usually associated with the two determiners to convey a message. In a subsequent mouse-tracking task, participants had to select one of two potential referents presented on screen according to an auditorily presented stimulus sentence. The data revealed that participants use the information about uniqueness or anti-uniqueness encoded in determiners to disambiguate sentence meaning as early as possible, but only when they are exclusively faced with felicitous uses of determiners.

Repeat After Us: Syntactic Alignment is Not Partner-Specific

Conversational partners match each other's speech, a process known as alignment. Such alignment can be partner-specific, when speakers match particular partners' production distributions, or partner-independent, when speakers match aggregated linguistic statistics across their input. However, partner-specificity has only been assessed in situations where it had clear communicative utility, and non-alignment might cause communicative difficulty. Here, we investigate whether speakers align partner-specifically even without a communicative need, and thus whether the mechanism driving alignment is sensitive to communicative and social factors of the linguistic context. In five experiments, participants interacted with two experimenters, each with unique and systematic syntactic preferences (e.g., Experimenter A only produced double object datives and Experimenter B only produced prepositional datives). Across multiple exposure conditions, participants engaged in partner-independent but not partner-specific alignment. Thus, when partner-specificity does not add communicative utility, speakers align to aggregate, partner-independent statistical distributions, supporting a communicatively-modulated mechanism underlying alignment.

Linking Hypothesis and Number of Response Options Modulate Inferred Scalar Implicature Rate

The past 15 years have seen increasing experimental investigations of core pragmatic questions in the ever more active and lively field of experimental pragmatics. Within experimental pragmatics, many of the core questions have relied on the operationalization of the theoretical notion of "implicature rate." Implicature rate based results have informed the work on acquisition, online processing, and scalar diversity, inter alia. Implicature rate has typically been quantified as the proportion of "pragmatic" judgments in two-alternative forced choice truth value judgment tasks. Despite its theoretical importance, this linking hypothesis from implicature rate to behavioral responses has never been extensively tested. Here we show that two factors dramatically affect the "implicature rate" inferred from truth value judgment tasks: (a) the number of responses provided to participants; and (b) the linking hypothesis about what constitutes a "pragmatic" judgment. We argue that it is time for the field of experimental pragmatics to engage more seriously with its foundational assumptions about how theoretical notions map onto behaviorally measurable quantities, and present a sketch of an alternative linking hypothesis that derives behavior in truth value judgment tasks from probabilistic utterance expectations.

When it is apt to adapt: Flexible reasoning guides children's use of talker identity and disfluency cues

An eye-tracking methodology was used to examine whether children flexibly engage two voice-based cues, talker identity and disfluency, during language processing. Across two experiments, 5-year-olds (N = 58) were introduced to two characters with distinct color preferences. These characters then used fluent or disfluent instructions to refer to an object in a display containing items bearing either talker-preferred or talker-dispreferred colors. As the utterance began to unfold, the 5-year-olds anticipated that talkers would refer to talker-preferred objects. When children then encountered a disfluency in the unfolding description, they reduced their expectation that a talker was about to refer to a preferred object. The talker preference-related predictions, but not the disfluency-related predictions, were attenuated during the second half of the experiment as evidence accrued that talkers referred to dispreferred objects with equal frequency. In Experiment 2, the equivocal nature of talkers' referencing was made more apparent by removing neutral filler trials, where objects' colors were not associated with talker preferences. In this case, children ceased making all talker-related predictions during the latter half of the experiment. Taken together, the results provide insights into children's use of talker-specific cues and demonstrate that flexible and adaptive forms of reasoning account for the ways in which children draw on paralinguistic information during real-time processing.

Learning Additional Languages as Hierarchical Probabilistic Inference: Insights From First Language Processing

We present a framework of second and additional language (L2/Ln) acquisition motivated by recent work on socio-indexical knowledge in first language (L1) processing. The distribution of linguistic categories covaries with socio-indexical variables (e.g., talker identity, gender, dialects). We summarize evidence that implicit probabilistic knowledge of this covariance is critical to L1 processing, and propose that L2/Ln learning uses the same type of socio-indexical information to probabilistically infer latent hierarchical structure over previously learned and new languages. This structure guides the acquisition of new languages based on their inferred place within that hierarchy, and is itself continuously revised based on new input from any language. This proposal unifies L1 processing and L2/Ln acquisition as probabilistic inference under uncertainty over socio-indexical structure. It also offers a new perspective on crosslinguistic influences during L2/Ln learning, accommodating gradient and continued transfer (both negative and positive) from previously learned to novel languages, and vice versa.

Incremental implicit learning of bundles of statistical patterns

Forming an accurate representation of a task environment often takes place incrementally as the information relevant to learning the representation only unfolds over time. This incremental nature of learning poses an important problem: it is usually unclear whether a sequence of stimuli consists of only a single pattern, or multiple patterns that are spliced together. In the former case, the learner can directly use each observed stimulus to continuously revise its representation of the task environment. In the latter case, however, the learner must first parse the sequence of stimuli into different bundles, so as to not conflate the multiple patterns. We created a video-game statistical learning paradigm and investigated (1) whether learners without prior knowledge of the existence of multiple "stimulus bundles" - subsequences of stimuli that define locally coherent statistical patterns - could detect their presence in the input and (2) whether learners are capable of constructing a rich representation that encodes the various statistical patterns associated with bundles. By comparing human learning behavior to the predictions of three computational models, we find evidence that learners can handle both tasks successfully. In addition, we discuss the underlying reasons for why the learning of stimulus bundles occurs even when such behavior may seem irrational.

Readers generalize adaptation to newly-encountered dialectal structures to other unfamiliar structures

Growing evidence suggests that syntactic processing may be guided in part by expectations about the statistics of the input that comprehenders have encountered; however, these statistics and even the syntactic structures themselves vary from situation to situation. Some recent work suggests that readers can adapt to variability in the frequencies of known, but infrequent syntactic structures. But, the relation between adaptation to altered frequencies of familiar structures and learning to process unfamiliar, never-before-seen structures is under-explored. In two self-paced reading experiments, we investigated readers' adaptation to an unfamiliar structure used in some regional dialects of American English: the needs+past participle structure, such as using The car needs washed to mean The car needs to be washed. Study 1 used a novel Web-based recruitment method to target regions where participants were likely to be familiar (Ohio, western Pennsylvania) or unfamiliar (Colorado) with the needs+past participle structure. Participants unfamiliar with the structure initially read the structure more slowly, but over the course of the experiment came to read it more like the familiar participants. Study 2 further demonstrated that participants who have adapted to needs+past participle generalize this adaptation to a different, but related structure. These results suggest (a) that readers adapt to unfamiliar syntactic structures, (b) that, in doing so, they become more like existing users of those structures, and (c) that they can generalize this other structures that they may also be more likely to encounter. We discuss these results in the context of implicit learning accounts of exposure effects on syntactic processing.

Re-examining selective adaptation: Fatiguing feature detectors, or distributional learning?

When a listener hears many good examples of a /b/ in a row, they are less likely to classify other sounds on, e.g., a /b/-to-/d/ continuum as /b/. This phenomenon is known as selective adaptation and is a well-studied property of speech perception. Traditionally, selective adaptation is seen as a mechanistic property of the speech perception system, and attributed to fatigue in acoustic-phonetic feature detectors. However, recent developments in our understanding of non-linguistic sensory adaptation and higher-level adaptive plasticity in speech perception and language comprehension suggest that it is time to re-visit the phenomenon of selective adaptation. We argue that selective adaptation is better thought of as a computational property of the speech perception system. Drawing on a common thread in recent work on both non-linguistic sensory adaptation and plasticity in language comprehension, we furthermore propose that selective adaptation can be seen as a consequence of distributional learning across multiple levels of representation. This proposal opens up new questions for research on selective adaptation itself, and also suggests that selective adaptation can be an important bridge between work on adaptation in low-level sensory systems and the complicated plasticity of the adult language comprehension system.

The co-creation of meaningful action: bridging enaction and interactional sociology

What makes possible the co-creation of meaningful action? In this paper, we go in search of an answer to this question by combining insights from interactional sociology and enaction. Both research schools investigate social interactions as such, and conceptualize their organization in terms of autonomy. We ask what it could mean for an interaction to be autonomous, and discuss the structures and processes that contribute to and are maintained in the so-called interaction order. We also discuss the role played by individual vulnerability as well as the vulnerability of social interaction processes in the co-creation of meaningful action. Finally, we outline some implications of this interdisciplinary fraternization for the empirical study of social understanding, in particular in social neuroscience and psychology, pointing out the need for studies based on dynamic systems approaches on origins and references of coordination, and experimental designs to help understand human co-presence.

Talker-Specific Generalization of Pragmatic Inferences based on Under- and Over-Informative Prenominal Adjective Use

According to Grice's (1975) Maxim of Quantity, rational talkers formulate their utterances to be as economical as possible while conveying all necessary information. Naturally produced referential expressions, however, often contain more or less information than what is predicted to be optimal given a rational speaker model. How do listeners cope with these variations in the linguistic input? We argue that listeners navigate the variability in referential resolution by calibrating their expectations for the amount of linguistic signal to be expended for a certain meaning and by doing so in a context- or a talker-specific manner. Focusing on talker-specificity, we present four experiments. We first establish that speakers will generalize information from a single pair of adjectives to unseen adjectives in a speaker-specific manner (Experiment 1). Initially focusing on exposure to underspecified utterances, Experiment 2 examines: (a) the dimension of generalization; (b) effects of the strength of the evidence (implicit or explicit); and (c) individual differences in dimensions of generalization. Experiments 3 and 4 ask parallel questions for exposure to over-specified utterances, where we predict more conservative generalization because, in spontaneous utterances, talkers are more likely to over-modify than under-modify.