Speakers exploit a set of conventions and a common background in order to communicate efficiently. As a result, utterances often imply information that is not expressly contained in their propositional content. This requires perceivers to infer missing information. The speed and seeming automaticity of these sorts of inferences presents a real challenge for researchers, because inferences might be based on any number of factors both general to the world and specific to the immediate discourse and communicative environment. This project explores a specific type of inference that relates modified NPs and discourse contrast. A growing body of evidence suggests that modified NPs often cause individuals to infer the presence of a discourse contrast -a set of entities compatible with the denotation of the head noun, but differing with respect to the modifier. Because many types of information are potentially relevant to, or dependent on, contrastive interpretations, a number of techniques will be used. Data will come from 1) elicited production tasks to better understand the role of what speakers choose to say; 2) experiments that monitor perceivers? eye-movements while listening to sentences to gain insight into how early different information sources are taken into account; and 3) reading studies in order to understand how inferential processes can interact with complexity. Two central questions will be addressed: What sorts of information are available to early inferential deliberations, and what kind of resource limitations are imposed on the processes that project a contrast? The answers to these questions will shed light on how information from within the sentence and from the extrasentential context are combined in interpretation. These insights are potentially relevant for understanding cognitive and neurological deficits that result in language impairments, particularly those such as autism that appear to involve specific difficulty with pragmatic aspects of communication.
| Grodner, Daniel; Gibson, Edward; Watson, Duane (2005) The influence of contextual contrast on syntactic processing: evidence for strong-interaction in sentence comprehension. Cognition 95:275-96 |
