Ich sehe was was du nicht siehst: Common ground and contrastive information in childrens and adults reference resolution

语言话语的意义不仅取决于词汇语义内容及其句法结构，还取决于说话人的意图。在人类交际中，共同点知识和共同点中备选词语的存在有效地指导了说话人指称表达的选择。对于听话人来说，具有特定语言形式的话语可以有不同的解释，听话人必须定期整合语用原则来确定说话人的可能解释是什么。大量的实验研究表明，指称表达大多是由说话人优化定制的，以提供足够但不多余的信息来唯一识别所指对象。然而，信息过多和信息不足的话语仍然存在于交际环境中；它们会导致更高的处理成本，并被认为不太适合最佳话语。使用实验方法更好地理解语用加工的机制是一个相对较新的尝试。因此，词汇-语义、句法和语用过程相互作用的在线时间进程仍在争论中。对时间敏感的语言处理的在线测量，如视觉世界眼球跟踪范例或与事件相关的大脑电位，提供了对话语的(自动)解释如何随着时间的推移而展开的细粒度洞察。此外，这些方法同样适用于成人和幼儿，以揭示其发展和潜在的共同机制。该项目将调查共同基础知识和对比信息的存在如何影响话语理解过程中的参照解决。根据XPrag.de的目标，该项目将在不同的人群中寻求一种实验性的方法，即3至5岁的儿童和成年人。具体地说，我们感兴趣的问题是语用知识在理解过程中何时被整合到句子意义的构建中。我们将从两个不同的角度来考虑何时的问题：首先，我们会问语用知识是否能立即制约话语的分析，或者语用知识是否只与后来的加工阶段有关，在这个过程中，不同的信息源被整合起来，形成话语意义的表征。其次，我们将询问儿童何时获得这一领域的相关语用原则，以及这种语用发展与非语言社会认知技能的发展有何关系。总之，我们项目的总体目标是了解语用信息在语言理解中何时与句法和词汇语义信息相互作用，这种能力何时发展，以及语用信息的理解是否以及如何依赖于心理能力理论。

The meaning of a linguistic utterance does not only depend on the lexico-semantic content and its syntactic structure but also on the speakers intention. In human communication, common ground knowledge and the presence of alternatives in the common ground efficiently guide the choice of referring expressions of the speaker. For the hearer an utterance with a specific linguistic form can have different interpretations and the hearer must regularly integrate pragmatic principles to determine which of the possible interpretations has been intended by the speaker.There is a large body of experimental research showing that referring expressions mostly are optimally tailored by the speaker to provide sufficient but no redundant information to uniquely identify a referent. However, over- and under-informative utterances still occur in communicative settings; they lead to higher processing costs and are judged as less appropriate than optimal utterances. The use of experimental approaches to better understand the mechanisms underlying pragmatic processing is a relatively recent enterprise. Hence, the online time-course of the interaction of lexical-semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic processes is still under debate. Time-sensitive online measures of linguistic processing such as the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm or event related brain potentials provide fine-grained insights how the (automatic) interpretation of utterances unfolds over time. Moreover, these methods can be applied to adults and very young children alike to shed light on the development and the underlying common mechanisms.The proposed project will investigate how common ground knowledge and the presence of contrastive information affects reference resolution during the comprehension of utterances. In line with the goals of XPrag.de, the project will pursuit an experimental approach in different populations, namely 3 to 5 year old children and adults. Specifically we are interested in the question WHEN pragmatic knowledge is integrated in the construction of sentence meaning during comprehension. The question of WHEN will be considered from two different perspectives: first, we will ask whether pragmatic knowledge can constrain the parsing of utterances immediately or whether pragmatic knowledge is only relevant in later processing stages in which different information sources are integrated to form a representation of the utterance meaning. Second we will ask WHEN children acquire the relevant pragmatic principles in this area and how this pragmatic development is related to the development of non-linguistic socio-cognitive skills. In summary, the overall goal of our project is to understand when pragmatic information interacts with syntactic and lexical-semantic information in language comprehension, when this competence is developed in childhood, and if and how the understanding of pragmatic information depends on theory of mind capacities.