Quiz #4 Flashcards
What’s in common ground?
- Sometimes assumed (world knowledge)
- Sometimes context-dependent
If something’s not in common ground, how do we get it there?
Negotiation and back-channeling in dialogue
How do we study use of common ground in dialogue? (2)
- Study naturalistic dialogue in a constrained context
- Referential games
Conceptual pact
Interlocutors develop a “conceptual pact” to reference weird objects
Brennan & Clark on conceptual pacts
Conceptual pacts last even if they’re no longer needed to distinguish between objects (ex: stays high heel instead of shoe)
Ibarra & Tanenhaus on conceptual pacts
Referring expression more likely to change trial-to-trial in Build Phase than Item Phase
Do people tend to break pact or keep pact when a new competitor arrises?
Break pact- more words to refer to blocky turtle after real turtle is revealed, breaks conceptual pact
Brown-Schmidt et al. in Barnyard Oscars game
- Listeners can quickly figure out what speaker is asking about by using common ground
- Occurs immediately, before disambiguating info
Heller, Grodner, & Tanenhaus on whether listeners are able to quickly use common ground to infer referential meaning (duck, box, soap)
- 2 contrast condition: have to wait until noun
- 1 contrast condition: “big” should refer to duck, participants look at duck early
Production Ease
Just produce whatever is easiest, disregarding your interlocutor
Audience Design
Make things as easy to understand for your interlocutor as possible (even if it’s harder to produce)
Pros & cons of production ease
- Easier in moment
- Risk of listener not understanding you
Pros & cons of audience design
- Your listener will have better comprehension
- Taxing for attention/memory
- Utterances might take longer/more effort to produce
Brown & Dell on whether speakers mention items important to a story at a higher rate when their listener doesn’t have knowledge of them
- Typical vs atypical instrument
- Within clause: “The robber stabbed a man with a knife”
- Separate clause: “The robber stabbed the man. He used a knife”
- Subsequent mention: “The robber stabbed the man. He wiped blood off the knife”
Brown & Dell conclusions
Production ease first, only repair later, audience design as an afterthought
Lockbridge & Brennan- redo of Brown and Dell experiment
- No visual co-presence
- Full co-presence
- Vastly different results when design is more naturalistic
- Big audience design effect when speaker knows what the listener does and doesn’t know
Wu & Keysar about how speakers refer to novel objects when their listeners know or don’t know their names
- Perfect audience design requires remembering which objects were learned together or separately
- Too costly for memory
- Applied a general audience design strategy
Ibarra (2018) on how we use this kind of audience design in day-to-day life?
- Investigate common vs rare everyday objects (ex: mandoline vs tongs)
- After, rate how well other seems to know category
- We tailor terms we use based on what we think our listener probably does/doesn’t know
Nature
Biologically determined (nativism)
Nuture
Fill in the “blank slate” (empiricism)
Critical period hypothesis (CPH)
Acquisition in a critical time frame. After this period, acquisition is difficult
Chomsky’s view of acquisition
Poverty of stimulus:
- quantity: insufficient input from the environment for rule learning
- quality of input not good enough
- Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
- Universal grammar
- Principles and parameters, parameters can be language-specific
Constraint-based approach
Optimality Theory (OT)
- Set of constraints
- Output is generated by constraint rankings
How is first language acquired? (3)
- Imitation
- Conditioning and reinforcement
- Acquisition of english consonants at different rates
Acquisition of rules
- Wug test
- Use of pseudoword
- Saying /z/ instead of /s/
Statistical learning
- Learning from distribution (phonology, syntax)
- Probability (Transitional Probability)
- Frequency
Saffran, Aslin, & Newport baby study
- 8 month olds listened to string of familiar and new strings
- Longer listening time to new orderings
Eimas high amplitude sucking procedure
- Hearing a stimulus repetitively –> sucking rate decreases
- Play another sound: if sucking rate increases –> evidence for perceiving the difference
Switch task (Stager and Werker) phases (2)
- Habituation phase
- Testing phase
- Infants can hear difference between 2 phonemes /b/ and /d/, but ignored when linking sounds with pics
Habituation phase
An object paired with an auditory stimulus
Testing phase
Hear either the same pairing, or a new word paired with the familiar object
Lexical representation
Sound and meaning properties of words and certain constraints on their syntactic combination
Whole-object bias
How do babies know that a rabbit is the whole animal, not just its feet?
-Bias to associate the word with the whole object instead of its features
Hollich et al on whole-object bias
- Baby will look longer at objects that have been named than at other objects
- Look longer at whole than the part
Under-extension of mapping words to concepts
Mapping new words into categories that are too specific (ex: referring to a carnation, but not a daisy, as a flower)
Over-extension of mapping words to concepts
Mapping new words into categories that are too general (ex: referring to all animals as doggie)
Werker and Tees (1984) on phonological development
Infants (before 10 mos) can discriminate non-native contrasts, but lose ability after 10 months
Liu & Kager on discrimination
Babies show discrimination of both phonemic and prosodic differences in another language, gradual loss after 10 months
Werker and Tees (2005)
- Perceptual reorganization
- Plasticity in developmental trajectory
- Discrimination vs distinct lexical representations
When does syntax come into play? (2)
- Production (late-syntax theory)
2. Comprehension (early-syntax theory)
How do children learn argument structure? (4)
- Overgeneralization first
- Using semantics to figure out argument structure
- Verb-island hypothesis: “key” verbs first –> other later
- Probabilistic interference (stats)
Bloom on rich interpretation of utterances
- Context-driven
- Role of pragmatics
Telegraphic speech
- Lacking morphology
- Simple syntactic structures
