权益分类	功能权益	普通用户	{{item.name}}会员
{{category.name}}	{{benefitItem.name}}

Integrating Linguistic and Social Meaning in Imprecision Resolution

在不精确解决中整合语言和社会意义

基本信息

批准号：
2140765
负责人：
FLORIAN SCHWARZ
金额：
$ 34.59万
依托单位：
University of Pennsylvania
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2022
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2022-09-01 至 2025-02-28
项目状态：
未结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2140765&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Integrating Linguistic Social Meaning Imprecision

项目摘要

Whenever we talk, we not only describe how things are, but also reveal information about who we are — our origin, identity, and personality. The proposed project aims at exploring how reasoning about a speaker's identity affects how we interpret what they are saying, and to what extent we should believe what they say. It pursues this question by focusing on how people interpret the meaning of a sentence depending on stereotypical features of a speaker — for example, on whether they look like, or sound like, a "Surfer Dude"; a "Nerd"; a "Valley Girl"; a Law School student; or some other socially recognizable stereotype. Investigating this issue will lead us to better understand not only how we exchange information in everyday life, but also, and most importantly, how the interpretation of sentences leads humans to ascribe more trust to members of some social groups as opposed to others, reflecting and reinforcing biases and preferences towards some people to the exclusion of others. This research will thus shed light on the implicit, and often unconscious, mechanisms whereby human communication reflects and reshapes society and culture; and to unveil potentially harmful and discriminatory consequences that these processes might have for people's lives. Drawing on experimental methods, this project explores how comprehenders integrate social information about speaker identity to compute the message conveyed by a sentence. It investigates this question through the lens of (im)precision, the phenomenon observed when speakers use words in a way that deviates from their literal meaning — such as when they describe an actual price of $312 as $300. Of particular interest is the question of how the interpretation of numerals is affected by the social stereotype embodied by a particular speaker. Previous work has shown that speakers using numerals precisely vs. imprecisely are associated with different sets of personality and identity traits: for example, someone describing the price as "$312" tends to be perceived as more articulate, studious, and pedantic than someone describing it, more liberally, as $300. This result motivates the hypothesis that, conversely, interlocutors reason about the social identity of a speaker to determine how precisely to interpret what they say: that is, that a sentence such as "The price is $300" uttered by a "nerdy, articulate" speaker is more likely to be interpreted as meaning exactly $300 than the same sentence uttered by a "chill, laid-back" one. We furthermore ask whether imprecise uses of the same sentence are more likely to be believed to be true when said by a "nerdy" speaker as opposed to a "chill" one. By bringing together the social, cognitive and descriptive underpinnings of human communication, this research builds new bridges between different approaches to the study of language, and deepens the integration of theories and traditions across linguistics and psychology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

每当我们交谈时，我们不仅描述事物的情况，而且还揭示了我们是谁的信息-我们的起源，身份和个性。该项目旨在探索对说话者身份的推理如何影响我们如何解释他们所说的话，以及我们应该在多大程度上相信他们所说的话。它通过关注人们如何根据说话者的刻板特征来解释句子的含义来追求这个问题-例如，他们是否看起来像，或者听起来像，“冲浪小子”;“书呆子”;“山谷女孩”;法学院的学生;或者其他一些社会公认的刻板印象。调查这个问题将使我们更好地了解我们如何在日常生活中交换信息，而且，最重要的是，句子的解释如何导致人类对某些社会群体的成员给予更多的信任，而不是其他人，反映和加强对某些人的偏见和偏好，而排斥其他人。因此，这项研究将揭示隐含的，往往是无意识的，机制，使人类沟通反映和重塑社会和文化，并揭示潜在的有害和歧视性的后果，这些进程可能对人们的生活。该项目利用实验方法，探讨了说话人如何整合关于说话人身份的社会信息来计算句子所传达的信息。它通过精确（im）的透镜来研究这个问题，即当说话者以偏离其字面意思的方式使用单词时所观察到的现象-例如当他们将312美元的实际价格描述为300美元时。特别感兴趣的是数字的解释如何受到特定说话者所体现的社会刻板印象的影响。先前的研究表明，说话者使用精确数字和不精确数字与不同的人格和身份特征有关：例如，有人将价格描述为“312美元”，往往被认为比更自由地描述为300美元的人更清晰，更勤奋，更学究气。这一结果激发了一个假设，即相反，对话者对说话者的社会身份进行推理，以确定如何准确地解释他们所说的话：也就是说，一个“书呆子，口齿伶俐”的说话者说出的“价格是300美元”这样的句子比一个“冷静，悠闲”的人说出的同样的句子更有可能被解释为确切的300美元。我们进一步询问，当同一个句子的不精确用法由一个“书呆子”说话者而不是一个“冷酷”的人说时，是否更有可能被认为是真的。通过将人类交流的社会、认知和描述基础结合在一起，该研究在语言研究的不同方法之间建立了新的桥梁，并深化了语言学和心理学理论和传统的整合。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。