Reference Production and Comprehension: the Roles of Egocentric and Joint Attention

当说话者提到他们周围的事物时，他们必须不断地选择如何明确地引用他们的引用，在“克林顿”、“来自纽约的参议员”和“她”之间做出选择。当听众听到这些引用时，他们必须弄清楚说话者指的是谁，尽管事实上，输入本身往往不足以识别一个唯一的参考。有人提出，这是可能的，因为说话者和听者会跟踪哪些实体可能成为话语参与者关注的焦点，这使得说话者可以使用不太具体的形式（例如，“她”），听者也可以理解它们。然而，关于说话者和听者是如何塑造这种共同的注意力焦点的，以及个人的、内部的加工努力和注意力焦点是如何影响参考的产生和理解的，还有许多悬而未决的问题。这个项目研究了参考加工是如何受到公共的、关于话语参与者注意力的共享信息，以及非公共的、非基于话语的注意力和加工努力的影响的。它通过同时研究参考产生和理解的过程，并采用视觉注意文献中的技术来操纵注意焦点，对个人注意和语言信息之间的相互作用进行了全面的研究。理解研究使用眼球追踪技术来理解几百毫秒内发生的判断。该项目的研究结果将有助于对人类交流参考的共同而又实际复杂的能力有一个机械的理解。

When speakers refer to things in the world around them, they must constantly make choices about how explicit to make their references, choosing between forms like "Clinton", "the senator from New York", and "she". As listeners hear these references, they have to figure out which person the speaker is referring to, despite the fact that the input itself is often insufficient to identify a unique referent. It has been proposed that this is possible because speakers and listeners keep track of which entities are likely to be in the focus of attention of discourse participants, which allows speakers to use less specific forms (e.g., "she"), and listeners to understand them. However, there are many unanswered questions about exactly how speakers and listeners model this joint focus of attention, and how individual, internal processing effort and focus of attention impact reference production and understanding.This project investigates how reference processing is influenced by both public, shared information about the attention of discourse participants, and non-public, non-discourse-based attention and processing effort. It offers a comprehensive examination of the interaction between individual attention and linguistic information, by simultaneously studying the processes of reference production and comprehension, and by adopting techniques from the visual attention literature to manipulate focus of attention. Comprehension studies use eye-tracking techniques to understand the judgments that occur within a few hundred milliseconds. The findings of this project will contribute to a mechanistic understanding of the common and yet pragmatically complex human ability to communicate reference.