The positive side of a negative reference: the delay between linguistic processing and common ground.

ABSTRACT: Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from tw

SUBMITTER: Kronmuller E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5367312 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature