Integrating Linguistic and Social Meaning in Imprecision Resolution

每当我们交谈时，我们不仅描述事物是怎样的，而且还透露关于我们是谁的信息--我们的起源、身份和个性。这个拟议的项目旨在探索关于说话者身份的推理如何影响我们解释他们所说的话，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印象来解释句子的意思来解决这个问题--例如，他们看起来或听起来像不像“冲浪汉”、“书呆子”、“山谷女孩”、法学院的学生或其他一些社会上可识别的刻板印象。研究这一问题将使我们不仅更好地理解我们在日常生活中是如何交换信息的，而且最重要的是，对句子的解释如何导致人们将更多的信任赋予一些社会群体的成员，而不是其他社会群体的成员，反映和强化了对一些人的偏见和偏好，而忽略了另一些人。因此，这项研究将揭示人类交流反映和重塑社会和文化的隐含的、往往是无意识的机制，并揭示这些过程可能对人们的生活产生的潜在有害和歧视性后果。利用实验方法，这个项目探索了理解者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(Im)精确度的镜头来研究这个问题，这是当说话者以偏离字面意思的方式使用词语时观察到的现象-例如，当他们将312美元的实际价格描述为300美元时。特别令人感兴趣的是，数字的解释如何受到特定说话者所体现的社会陈规定型观念的影响。之前的研究表明，使用数字的说话者与不精确的说话者之间存在不同的个性和身份特征：例如，有人把价格描述为312美元，往往比其他人更清晰、更勤奋、更卖弄学问，而另一个人则更宽泛地将其描述为300美元。这一结果支持了这样一种假设：相反，对话者会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，一句话，比如由一位口齿伶俐的“书呆子”说出的“价格是300美元”，比起一个“冷静、从容”的人说出的同一句话，更有可能被理解为300美元的意思。此外，我们还想知道，与“冷酷”的说话者相比，“书呆子”说话者对同一句话的不精确使用是否更有可能被认为是正确的。通过将人类交流的社会、认知和描述性基础结合在一起，这项研究在不同的语言研究方法之间建立了新的桥梁，并深化了语言学和心理学领域的理论和传统的整合。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.