A listener's task in everyday conversation is to determine what speakers mean by uttering particular sentences on particular occasions. The speaker's meaning of a sentence can vary considerably among occasions of use. For example, an utterance of """"""""It's hot in here"""""""" may communicate (among an unlimited number of possibilities) simply the information that a room is hot, a request that a window should be opened, or a reminder that fuel should be conserved. In each case, a listener must recover the specific meaning that the speaker intended. The experiments proposed here are designed to examine some of the properties of speakers' meanings. They fall under two headings: 1. Priming by speaker's meaning. Suppose a speaker says, """"""""The cows have come home"""""""" and means by that, """"""""For once, Bruce isn't whining about money."""""""" What is the psychological status of this speaker's meaning? Specifically, in what sense is the indirect communication of this meaning equivalent to a direct statement? Priming techniques will provide data on the properties of representations of these speakers' meanings. 2. The resolution of speaker-sensitive ambiguities. Listeners must often examine the knowledge they share with a speaker to recover his or her intended meanings. For example, to understand the ambiguous utterance """"""""I did what I said I was going to do"""""""", a listener must access from memory an appropriate shared episode. How do listeners exploit shared knowledge to resolve such ambiguities? A variety of techniques will be used to determine by what processes listeners are able to be sensitive to the dependence of meaning on speakers' intentions.
| Gerrig, R J; Littman, M L (1990) Disambiguation by community membership. Mem Cognit 18:331-8 |
