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
