Mechanisms of predictability in reference production: Effects of semantic role, utterance planning, and audience design

在促进人类交流的核心认知能力中，有一种能力是利用各种类型的指称表达--名称、描述和代词--来识别充当句子中谓词论元的对象、实体和概念。交际的成功在很大程度上取决于说话者如何在所有可能的指称表达中进行选择，以挑出一个具体的谓词论元。人们擅长追踪世界事件的可预测性。这种可预测性对语言的使用有很大的影响。例如，当信息是可预测的时，说话者倾向于使用更短和更简单的语言形式，如代词(他/她)而不是更长的表达(苏，女人)，以及更听觉上的简化发音而不是更长/强调的发音。这项研究考察了这一效应的一个争论领域：语义角色可预测性。如果说话者报告了一个事件，比如“Ann把球传给了Sue”，那么有些事件更有可能是后续事件，例如“……Sue投篮了。”这源于苏的语义角色：她是球的接受者，因此可能会被期望用球做些什么。然而，研究人员对这种类型的可预测性是否对代词的产生有影响存在分歧。尽管有大量证据表明声学减缩总体上受到可预测性的影响，但还没有人研究语义角色可预测性是如何影响声学减缩的。在这个由NSF资助的项目中，Jennifer Arnold博士和她的学生致力于解决语义角色可预测性对参照形式的影响这一难题。他们使用新的实验方法来模拟自然语言产生的特征，并使用语料库分析来衡量真实语言使用中的语义角色可预测性。他们采取了一种综合的方法，既检查了代词的使用，也检查了声学上的减少。语义-角色可预测性将在其他众所周知的影响的背景下进行考察，例如句法可预测性。眼球跟踪和时序分析将为参照产生的认知机制提供证据。这项研究将阐明人们如何跟踪世界上的信息并将其融入语言等日常行为的基本问题。它将为培训研究生和本科生提供一个框架，并将为开发参考生产的机械化模式提供必要的信息

Among the core cognitive abilities that facilitates human communication is the ability to exploit various types of referring expressions--names, descriptions, and pronouns--to identify the objects, entities, and concepts that serve as predicate arguments in sentences. Communicative success depends heavily on how speakers choose among the full range of potential referring expressions to single out a specific predicate argument. People are good at tracking the predictability of events in the world. Such predictability has strong effects on language use. For example, speakers tend to use shorter and simpler linguistic forms when information is predictable, such as pronouns (he/she) instead of longer expressions (Sue, the woman), and more acoustically reduced pronunciations instead of longer/emphatic ones. This study examines one domain where this effect is debated: semantic role predictability. If a speaker reports an event like "Ann passed Sue the ball," some events are relatively more likely continuations, e.g. "... and Sue shot a basket." This stems from the semantic role of Sue: she was the recipient of the ball, and therefore might be expected to do something with it. Yet researchers disagree whether this type of predictability matters for pronoun production. And despite extensive evidence that acoustic reduction is influenced by predictability in general, no one has looked at how acoustic reduction is affected by semantic role predictability.In this NSF-funded project, Dr. Jennifer Arnold and her students aim to solve the puzzle of semantic role predictability effects on reference form. They use new experimental methods that aim to mimic the characteristics of natural language production, and corpus analysis to measure semantic role predictability from real language use. They take a comprehensive approach, examining both pronoun use and acoustic reduction. Semantic-role predictability will be examined against the backdrop of other well-known effects, like syntactic predictability. Eye-tracking and timing analyses will provide evidence about the cognitive mechanisms of reference production.This study will shed light on fundamental questions about how people track information in the world and incorporate it into daily behaviors like language. It will provide a framework for training both graduate and undergraduate students, and will provide information necessary for developing a mechanistic model of reference production