To use language effectively, people need to make the right inferences in context, because language itself always leaves something underspecified. A common example of this comes from pronouns. If you hear "she left", how do you know who "she" is? Previous work by this research group and others has shown that people use the context to infer the speaker's meaning. For example, linguistic context matters: people tend to assume that "she" refers to someone recently mentioned, or someone important to the discourse. In addition, people follow social cues like pointing and gazing, and tend to think the pronoun refers to someone who is being pointed at or gazed at. This raises questions about how people understand language when the context is complex, and linguistic and social cues might conflict. Recent research by this research team suggests that people differ in terms of whether they pay more attention ot the linguistic context or social cues, where people who read more also tend to pay more attention to the linguistic context.
The current project tests an idea that surfaces in many current theories about language, which is that people understand referential words, like pronouns, based on their judgements about who the speaker is most likely to refer to. That is, people might make fast, subconscious predictions about what the speaker's meaning will be. The goal of this project is to test how broadly this idea accounts for different ways in which the context constrains pronoun interpretation. In a series of experiments, we use a cartoon video task to test how people understand pronouns, depending on four different types of linguistic context, and two types of social cues (gaze and pointing). We also test whether the amount people read (termed 'print exposure') predicts how they understand pronouns. Another series of experiments uses a guessing game to test whether these same conditions affect people's judgments about who the speaker is likely to refer to. This study provides a strong test of the idea that multiple aspects of the context help people make predictions about who (or what) the speaker will refer to, and that this is what allows us to understand reference. It also tests questions about why people are different in how they understand pronouns. Findings from this project may help us understand how to communicate better with people from different backgrounds, and how reading experience and education affects spoken language comprehension. This project will provide STEM training to numerous graduate and undergraduate students.
