Dutch speakers take referent predictability into account, irrespective of addressee presence

Abstract

Language comprehension involves continuously making predictions about what will be mentioned next. If speakers take these predictions into account, one would expect that they try to be extra clear (e.g., by saying “the girl with the big earrings”) when they are going to say something less predictable. Conversely, speakers do not need to be as clear when the listener already expects the thing that they are about to mention, and can therefore suffice with a pronoun such as she. Previous research testing this hypothesis has found mixed results, with some studies finding that the referent’s predictability in discourse affects pronoun use and others finding that it does not. One explanation might be that speakers are more likely to take predictability into account when there is a co-present addressee who is predicting the next referent. To test this possibility, I conducted a language production experiment in which participants produced spoken continuations of narrative fragments. The fragments were accompanied by pictures that made clear how the story continued. Half of the participants performed the task without anyone else being present, while the other half told the stories to another person, who had to pick out the correct picture. Referent predictability was varied by manipulating the coherence relation in the narrative context. In addition, I calculated a surprisal score for each character in each narrative, as a more direct measure of its predictability. The results showed that with higher predictability, speakers were indeed more likely to use a pronoun than a definite NP to refer to the target character in their continuations. However, it did not matter whether the speaker was telling the stories to a co-present addressee or not. The results are discussed in light of accounts that distinguish between taking the perspective of a specific and that of a hypothetical listener.