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

当演讲者提到他们周围世界的事物时，他们必须不断地选择如何明确地表达他们的参考，在“克林顿”，“来自纽约的参议员”和“她”之间进行选择。当听者听到这些指称时，他们必须弄清楚说话者指的是哪个人，尽管事实上输入本身往往不足以识别唯一的指称。 已经提出，这是可能的，因为说话者和听者跟踪哪些实体可能处于话语参与者的关注焦点，这允许说话者使用不太具体的形式（例如，“她”），和听众理解他们。然而，关于说话者和听话者如何共同关注指称，以及个体的内部加工努力和关注焦点如何影响指称的产生和理解，仍有许多问题没有得到解答。本研究探讨了指称加工如何受到话语参与者的公共信息和非公共信息的影响。它提供了一个全面的检查个人注意和语言信息之间的相互作用，通过同时研究的参考生产和理解的过程，并采用技术从视觉注意力的文献来操纵注意力的焦点。理解研究使用眼动追踪技术来理解几百毫秒内发生的判断。这个项目的研究结果将有助于一个共同的，但实用复杂的人类交流参考能力的机械理解。

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.