Work

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

Year: 2008

Type: article

Abstract: 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.

Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition

DOI: 10.1037/a0013353

Authors: Liane Wardlow Lane, Victor S. Ferreira

Institution: University of California San Diego

Language: English

Topic: Categorization, perception, and language

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Awards: G132058544, Syntactic flexibility in language production, Syntactic flexibility in language production