Listeners use descriptive contrast to disambiguate novel referents and make inferences about novel categories

Claire Bergey,Daniel Yurovsky

doi:10.3765/elm.1.4946

Claire Bergey, Daniel Yurovsky

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.1.4946

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Abstract

In the face of unfamiliar language or objects, description is one cue people can use to learn about both. Beyond narrowing potential referents to those that match a descriptor, listeners could infer that a described object is one that contrasts with other relevant objects of the same type (e.g., “The tall cup” contrasts with another, shorter cup). This contrast may be in relation to other objects present in the environment or to the referent’s category. In two experiments, we investigate whether listeners use descriptive contrast to resolve reference and make inferences about novel referents’ categories. While participants use size adjectives contrastively to guide novel referent choice, they do not reliably do so using color adjectives (Experiment 1). Their contrastive inferences go beyond the current referential context: participants use description to infer that a novel object is atypical of its category (Experiment 2). Overall, people are able to use descriptive contrast to resolve reference and make inferences about a novel object’s category, allowing them to infer new word meanings and learn about new categories’ feature distributions.

Highlights

Suppose a friend asked you to “Pass the tall dax.” You might look around the room for two similar things that vary in height, and hand the taller one to them
Participants looked more quickly to the correct object when the utterance referred to an object with a same-category contrastive pair than when it referred to an object without a contrastive pair. These results suggest that listeners expect speakers to use description when they are distinguishing between potential referents of the same type, and use this inference to rapidly allocate their attention to the target object
In Experiment 1, we tested whether people could use contrastive inferences to resolve ambiguous reference to novel objects

Summary

Introduction

Suppose a friend asked you to “Pass the tall dax.” You might look around the room for two similar things that vary in height, and hand the taller one to them. You might look around the room for two similar things that vary in height, and hand the taller one to them. This is how people to respond to adjectives like “tall” with known objects—they preferentially consider candidate referents that have short competitors as soon as they hear “tall” (Sedivy et al, 1999). In a set of two experiments, we tested whether people use adjectives like “small” and “red” contrastively to determine the meaning of the novel word they heard, whether these adjectives lead people to infer the typical color or size of the described object’s category, and whether these two processes interact Would you be likely to in practice? In a set of two experiments, we tested whether people use adjectives like “small” and “red” contrastively to determine the meaning of the novel word they heard, whether these adjectives lead people to infer the typical color or size of the described object’s category, and whether these two processes interact

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Conclusion