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清楚地表达他们的意思，在“克林顿”、“来自纽约的参议员”和“她”之间做出选择。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，尽管输入本身往往不足以识别唯一的指称。有人提出，这是可能的，因为说话者和听话者跟踪哪些实体可能是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)，听话者可以理解他们。然而，关于说话者和听话者如何模拟这种联合注意焦点，以及个体的内部加工努力和注意焦点如何影响参照产生和理解，还有许多悬而未决的问题。本研究调查了参照加工是如何受到公共的、共享的关于话语参与者注意力的信息以及非公共的、非基于话语的注意和加工努力的影响。它通过同时研究指称产生和理解的过程，并采用视觉注意文献中的技术来操纵注意焦点，全面考察了个体注意和语言信息之间的相互作用。理解研究使用眼球跟踪技术来理解在几百毫秒内做出的判断。该项目的发现将有助于对人类交流参考资料的共同但实际复杂的能力进行机械性的理解。

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.