Listener's Knowledge Research Articles

EPS mid-career prize: An integrated framework for the learning, recognition and interpretation of words.

In this article, I review the evidence on the involvement of sleep and consolidation in word learning and processing during language comprehension, focusing on implications for theory. The theoretical basis for the review is a complementary systems account of word learning involving flexible (hippocampal) and stable (cortical) pathways to lexical knowledge. I argue that the accumulated data are consistent with a role for both pathways in both learning and recognition of lexical items, with sleep and consolidation supporting the transfer of recent experience between the pathways. The level of involvement of each pathway is dependent on key factors, such as consistency with prior knowledge in the case of learning, and reliance on context and/or automaticity in the case of recognition. As a consequence, the notion of a mental lexicon cannot really be restricted to just the listener's stable knowledge about words: flexible knowledge and recent experiences are also important. Furthermore, I argue that the flexible pathway plays a critical role even in the absence of new lexical items. The available evidence suggests that this pathway encodes (and potentially consolidates) recent linguistic experiences, providing potential benefits to interpretation of subsequent language and the long-term retention of knowledge. In conclusion, I propose that a dual-pathway account incorporating both flexibility and stability is necessary to explain the learning, recognition, and interpretation of words.

Ruled by construal?

Abstract In cognitive linguistics, grammatical structure is known to be representative of meaning. This is also true of English articles. In this paper, we argue that the choice of article, when the grammar allows it, is dependent on the wider discourse context and most importantly on how the speaker construes this context. Using survey data from 181 native speakers of English, we show that the choice of article depends on the activation of semantic frames and how speakers may choose to highlight different elements of a frame to construe the situation differently. We rely on Entropy to measure the restrictiveness of a context and to identify particular contexts in which choice is allowed or inhibited. We find that some contextual features such as the specificity of the referent are more restrictive while Hearer Knowledge is more open to construal.

From their point of view: the article category as a hierarchically structured referent tracking system

AbstractFull-fledged grammatical article systems as attested in Germanic and Romance languages are rather uncommon from a typological perspective. The frequency with which articles occur in these languages, together with the difficulty encountered in detecting them and the lack of a water-tight account of article use, make article errors one of the most frequent errors in language produced by L2 learners whose L1 does not feature an article system of similar complexity, all the while appearing unproblematic for L1 users. We present a conceptually and methodologically interdisciplinary approach to the grammatical category of articles in English and combine a usage-based, cognitive linguistic account of the function and use of articles that respects its discourse-based nature with a computational exploration of the challenges the system poses from the perspective of learning. Running a statistical classifier on a large sample of spoken and written discourse chunks extracted from the BNC and annotated for the five main determinants of article use reveals that Hearer Knowledge is the driver of a hierarchical system. Once Hearer Knowledge is acknowledged as the motivating principle of the category, article use becomes eminently predictable and restrictions are in line with the forms from which the articles have developed historically, withtheandaacting as category defaults and zero acting as default override. Simulations with a computational model anchored in the psychology of learning shed light on whether and how human cognition would handle the proposed relations detected in the data. We find that different articles have different learnability profiles that, again, are in line with their historical development: whilethecan be learned from one strong indicator, the relationships for the zero article are less exclusive. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the article category appears as a referent tracking system that grammaticalizes the principles of “audience design”: it forces a speaker to track and mark reference from the vantage point of the memory of the hearer, thereby reducing the processing effort required from the hearer. This particular mindset inverses the typologically dominant situation in which this information is not explicitly marked by the speaker but implicitly retrieved from context by the hearer.

She adapts to her student: An expert pragmatic speaker tailoring her referring expressions to the Layman listener.

Communication is a dynamic process through which interlocutors adapt to each other. In the development of conversational agents, this core aspect has been put aside for several years since the main challenge was to obtain conversational neural models able to produce utterances and dialogues that at least at the surface level are human-like. Now that this milestone has been achieved, the importance of paying attention to the dynamic and adaptive interactive aspects of language has been advocated in several position papers. In this paper, we focus on how a Speaker adapts to an interlocutor with different background knowledge. Our models undergo a pre-training phase, through which they acquire grounded knowledge by learning to describe an image, and an adaptive phase through which a Speaker and a Listener play a repeated reference game. Using a similar setting, previous studies focus on how conversational models create new conventions; we are interested, instead, in studying whether the Speaker learns from the Listener's mistakes to adapt to his background knowledge. We evaluate models based on Rational Speech Act (RSA), a likelihood loss, and a combination of the two. We show that RSA could indeed work as a backbone to drive the Speaker toward the Listener: in the combined model, apart from the improved Listener's accuracy, the language generated by the Speaker features the changes that signal adaptation to the Listener's background knowledge. Specifically, captions to unknown object categories contain more adjectives and less direct reference to the unknown objects.

Warm (for Winter): Inferring Comparison Classes in Communication.

The meanings of natural language utterances depend heavily on context. Yet, what counts as context is often only implicit in conversation. The utterance it's warm outside signals that the temperature outside is relatively high, but the temperature could be high relative to a number of different comparison classes: other days of the year, other weeks, other seasons, etc. Theories of context sensitivity in language agree that the comparison class is a crucial variable for understanding meaning, but little is known about how a listener decides upon the comparison class. Using the case study of gradable adjectives (e.g., warm), we extend a Bayesian model of pragmatic inference to reason flexibly about the comparison class and test its qualitative predictions in a large‐scale free‐production experiment. We find that human listeners infer the comparison class by reasoning about the kinds of observations that would be remarkable enough for a speaker to mention, given the speaker and listener's shared knowledge of the world. Further, we quantitatively synthesize the model and data using Bayesian data analysis, which reveals that usage frequency and a preference for basic‐level categories are two main factors in comparison class inference. This work presents new data and reveals the mechanisms by which human listeners recover the relevant aspects of context when understanding language.

Evidence of preserved audience design with aging in interactive conversation.

Speakers tailor referential expressions to the listener's knowledge, a phenomenon called audience design. Audience design requires access to partner-specific representations in memory, which could be compromised among older adults who experience memory declines. In fact, little is known about how the memory representation of shared knowledge with a conversational partner influences audience design in multiparty conversation. We examined how young and older adults tailor their utterances for partners holding different representations of the same item. Both younger and older adults successfully adjusted their referential expressions to the current partner's knowledge state in a live conversation. However, when memory was explicitly probed, older adults showed a source memory deficit in distinguishing which partner held which label. These results suggest that explicit memory may not be necessary for audience design, and that implicit memory processes, which are preserved with aging, may contribute to effective audience design. The findings highlight a pathway to preserved communicative competence with aging and the roles of multiple memory systems including both implicit and explicit systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The Role of Acoustic Distance and Sociolinguistic Knowledge in Dialect Identification.

Listeners are able to quite accurately distinguish between different dialects of their native language, but little is known about the process of dialect identification and the phonetic cues listeners use to identify someone’s regional origin. This study examines how different segments, acoustic between-dialect distance, and the listeners’ knowledge about a dialect contribute to this process. Native speakers of Grison and Zurich German were asked to categorise isolated words spoken by eight speakers of Grison and eight speakers of Zurich German. Stimuli contained either none, one, or two segmental cues to regional origin. The presence of one dialect-specific segment was enough to allow for an identification rate well above chance. Sensitivity measures and analysis of reaction time showed that the two dialect groups largely relied on the same segmental cues. Acoustic distance to the other dialect, quantified as Euclidean distance in the F1 × F2 vowel space, generally facilitated dialect identification, but interacted with native speakers’ knowledge about the dialects: in segments which listeners explicitly associated with one of the two dialects, acoustic distance facilitated dialect recognition to a larger extent than in segments in which listeners were not aware of dialectal variation. The results suggest that, depending on the listener’s prior knowledge about a dialect, acoustic variation is weighted differently. Further analysis showed that Zurich listeners were more sensitive to the dialect differences, responded faster, and presented a more marked own-dialect response bias than Grison listeners. These findings are in line with the status of Grison German as a marked dialect and Zurich German as a neutral dialect, and suggest that, depending on their own dialect’s status, listeners used different decision strategies.

Accent-induced bias in linguistic transcriptions

Many linguistic analyses rely on phonetic transcriptions. Two factors that might affect the accuracy of transcriptions are perceived accent and the listener's linguistic knowledge about that accent. This article focuses on the susceptibility of transcribers to such accent-induced bias, based on speaker's accent, transcriber's variety, and the transcriber's knowledge about the language variety they are transcribing. We offer a method to statistically detect accent-induced biases in linguistic transcriptions.This article investigates accent-induced bias in transcriptions of Reference French and Laurentian French (in Canada). In Reference French, high front vowels are phonologically tense /i y/, but they may be phonetically realised as lax [ɪ ʏ]. In Laurentian French, lax [ɪ ʏ] occur as allophones of /i y/. We compare transcriptions of different groups of coders: native speakers of Reference French, native speakers of Laurentian French, and advanced L2 learners of French who are native speakers of Dutch. Half of the Dutch group was informed about the native variety of the speakers and the other half was not.Results show that perceived accent among the native transcribers is a relatively strong predictor for transcribed sounds. In addition, the Dutch transcribers who were informed about the speaker's variety transcribed more lax vowels in Laurentian French and more tense vowels in Reference French than the Dutch transcribers who were not informed. Native transcribers also showed contextual effects related to the allophonic distribution of the vowels in Laurentian French. These results are indicative of accent-induced bias. The results are analysed in a predictive top-down model to explain the effect of prior experience and information about the language variety in speech perception.

Fitting the Message to the Listener: Children Selectively Mention General and Specific Facts.

In three experiments, two hundred and ninety-seven 4- to 6-year-olds were asked to describe objects to a listener, and their answers were coded for the presence of general and specific facts. In Experiments 1 and 2, the listener's knowledge of the kinds of objects was manipulated. This affected references to specific facts at all ages, but only affected references to general facts in children aged 5 and older. In Experiment 3, children's goal in communicating was either pedagogical or not. Pedagogy influenced references to general information from age 4, but not references to specific information. These findings are informative about how children vary general and specific information in conversation, and suggest that listeners' knowledge and children's pedagogical goals influenced children's responses via different mechanisms.

Production of Referring Expressions for an Unknown Audience: A Computational Model of Communal Common Ground.

This article presents a computational model of the production of referring expressions under uncertainty over the hearer's knowledge. Although situations where the hearer's knowledge is uncertain have seldom been addressed in the computational literature, they are common in ordinary communication, for example when a writer addresses an unknown audience, or when a speaker addresses a stranger. We propose a computational model composed of three complimentary heuristics based on, respectively, an estimation of the recipient's knowledge, an estimation of the extent to which a property is unexpected, and the question of what is the optimum number of properties in a given situation. The model was tested in an experiment with human readers, in which it was compared against the Incremental Algorithm and human-produced descriptions. The results suggest that the new model outperforms the Incremental Algorithm in terms of the proportion of correctly identified entities and in terms of the perceived quality of the generated descriptions.

Perceptual Learning of Acoustic Noise by Individuals With Dyslexia

A phonological deficit is thought to affect most individuals with developmental dyslexia. The present study addresses whether the phonological deficit is caused by difficulties with perceptual learning of fine acoustic details. A demanding test of nonverbal auditory memory, "noise learning," was administered to both adults with dyslexia and control adult participants. On each trial, listeners had to decide whether a stimulus was a 1-s noise token or 2 abutting presentations of the same 0.5-s noise token (repeated noise). Without the listener's knowledge, the exact same noise tokens were presented over many trials. An improved ability to perform the task for such "reference" noises reflects learning of their acoustic details. Listeners with dyslexia did not differ from controls in any aspect of the task, qualitatively or quantitatively. They required the same amount of training to achieve discrimination of repeated from nonrepeated noises, and they learned the reference noises as often and as rapidly as the control group. However, they did show all the hallmarks of dyslexia, including a well-characterized phonological deficit. The data did not support the hypothesis that deficits in basic auditory processing or nonverbal learning and memory are the cause of the phonological deficit in dyslexia.

Production of definite and indefinite articles in typically developing English-speaking children and children with SLI

The present paper examines the production of definite and indefinite articles in English-speaking typically developing (TD) children and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Twenty four English-speaking children with SLI (mean age: 7;5), twenty nine TD age-matched (TD-AM) children (mean age: 7;5) and eleven younger (mean age: 5;5) TD vocabulary-matched (TD-VM) children participated in a production task involving short stories without picture props based on Schafer and de Villiers (2000). Article production was examined in two different semantic contexts for the definite article, namely in the anaphoric and the bridging context. In the anaphoric condition, definiteness is established via linguistic means, whereas in the bridging condition via shared world knowledge. Indefinite article production was examined in the referential specific, non-referential predicational, and non-referential instrumental contexts. The referential specific context involves [+speaker, −hearer] knowledge and the non-referential predicational and instrumental [−speaker, −hearer] knowledge. Results showed that in the definite article contexts, all three groups performed better on the bridging compared with the anaphoric condition; in the indefinite article contexts, they had better performance on the non-referential predicational vs. the referential specific and the non-referential instrumental conditions. In terms of errors, the TD-VM children and the children with SLI produced significantly more substitutions than the TD-AM children in the definite article contexts. In the indefinite article contexts, the three groups did not differ in terms of accuracy or error patterns. The present results point towards problems in the discourse integration of entities that are part of the speaker's and hearer's knowledge in children with SLI and TD-VM controls, especially in definite articles. These problems are accentuated in the children with SLI due to their grammatical impairment and suggest that children with SLI exhibit a delayed acquisition profile.

Yes, You Can? A Speaker’s Potency to Act upon His Words Orchestrates Early Neural Responses to Message-Level Meaning

Evidence is accruing that, in comprehending language, the human brain rapidly integrates a wealth of information sources–including the reader or hearer’s knowledge about the world and even his/her current mood. However, little is known to date about how language processing in the brain is affected by the hearer’s knowledge about the speaker. Here, we investigated the impact of social attributions to the speaker by measuring event-related brain potentials while participants watched videos of three speakers uttering true or false statements pertaining to politics or general knowledge: a top political decision maker (the German Federal Minister of Finance at the time of the experiment), a well-known media personality and an unidentifiable control speaker. False versus true statements engendered an N400 - late positivity response, with the N400 (150–450 ms) constituting the earliest observable response to message-level meaning. Crucially, however, the N400 was modulated by the combination of speaker and message: for false versus true political statements, an N400 effect was only observable for the politician, but not for either of the other two speakers; for false versus true general knowledge statements, an N400 was engendered by all three speakers. We interpret this result as demonstrating that the neurophysiological response to message-level meaning is immediately influenced by the social status of the speaker and whether he/she has the power to bring about the state of affairs described.

Information structure: linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches.

Language form varies as a result of the information being communicated. Some of the ways in which it varies include word order, referential form, morphological marking, and prosody. The relevant categories of information include the way a word or its referent have been used in context, for example, whether a particular referent has been previously mentioned, and whether it plays a topical role in the current utterance or discourse. We first provide a broad review of linguistic phenomena that are sensitive to information structure. We then discuss several theoretical approaches to explaining information structure: information status as a part of the grammar; information status as a representation of the speaker's and listener's knowledge of common ground and/or the knowledge state of other discourse participants; and the optimal systems approach. These disparate approaches reflect the fact that there is little consensus in the field about precisely which information status categories are relevant, or how they should be represented. We consider possibilities for future work to bring these lines of work together in explicit psycholinguistic models of how people encode information status and use it for language production and comprehension. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:403-413. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1234 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language.

Assertion and The Provision of Knowledge

Epistemic relationism in the theory of assertion is the view that an assertion's epistemic propriety depends purely on the relation between the asserter and the proposition asserted. Many accounts of assertion are relationist in this sense, including the familiar knowledge, belief, and justification accounts. A notable feature of such accounts is that they give no direct importance to the role of hearer: as far as such accounts are concerned, we need make no mention of hearers in characterising an assertion's propriety conditions. This paper develops an account which rejects relationism, by giving central importance to the role of hearer. The paper introduces the knowledge provision account, according to which an assertion that p is proper only if it is fit to give a hearer knowledge that p. The paper aims to show: (i) that we can understand this account in a way which does not leave it open to obvious counterexamples, (ii) that it does not reduce to any familiar relationist account, and (iii) that it carries certain advantages over familiar relationist accounts.

Enhancing Preschoolers' Understanding of Ambiguity in Communication: A Training Study on <i>Misunderstandings</i>

Understanding knowledge acquisition involves a comprehension of the relationship between a person's access to relevant information and that person's subsequent knowledge. This report investigates how preschoolers improve in their ability to evaluate the effects of two distinct types of messages—ambiguous and informative—on a listener's knowledge. Three- and four-year olds were pre- and posttested for their ability to judge message quality from a third-person perspective. Between sessions, children were assigned to one of three training conditions. In all conditions, children observed a speaker providing ambiguous messages and informative messages to a listener. In the general-feedback condition, children were informed as to whether the listener gained knowledge after each message. In the specific-feedback condition, children were informed as to whether, as well as why, the listener gained knowledge. In the no-feedback condition, children were not informed as to the listener's state of knowledge. Children in the specific-feedback condition improved their ability to judge messages, and children in the general- feedback condition showed a marginally significant improvement. No learning effects, however, were observed in a transfer task for any of the groups. Results suggest that informing preschoolers about message quality during conversational exchanges contributes to their developing understanding of how people acquire knowledge about the world.

Effects of auditory priming on speech recognition in combination with spatial and fluctuating masker benefits

This presentation will discuss research on three individual causes of release from masking in speech recognition as well as the interactions among them. Spatial differences between target and masker produce release from masking through head shadow effects, binaural processing of interaural differences, and, under some specific circumstances, perceived spatial differences between target and masker. A second frequently-studied type of masking release occurs when fluctuations in a masker's amplitude envelope over time create temporal epochs in which speech-to-masker ratios are very favorable. The efficiency of masking is also reduced when a listener's prior knowledge of message content reduces uncertainty about what s/he will hear, a process often called auditory priming. This presentation will describe a series of recent experiments that consider factors that affect auditory priming and fluctuating masker benefit, individually and when combined with spatial cues. [Work supported by NIDCD DC01625.]

Linguistic contributions to speech-on-speech masking for native and non-native listeners: Language familiarity and semantic content

This study examined whether speech-on-speech masking is sensitive to variation in the degree of similarity between the target and the masker speech. Three experiments investigated whether speech-in-speech recognition varies across different background speech languages (English vs Dutch) for both English and Dutch targets, as well as across variation in the semantic content of the background speech (meaningful vs semantically anomalous sentences), and across variation in listener status vis-à-vis the target and masker languages (native, non-native, or unfamiliar). The results showed that the more similar the target speech is to the masker speech (e.g., same vs different language, same vs different levels of semantic content), the greater the interference on speech recognition accuracy. Moreover, the listener's knowledge of the target and the background language modulate the size of the release from masking. These factors had an especially strong effect on masking effectiveness in highly unfavorable listening conditions. Overall this research provided evidence that that the degree of target-masker similarity plays a significant role in speech-in-speech recognition. The results also give insight into how listeners assign their resources differently depending on whether they are listening to their first or second language.

Which is important for preschoolers' production and repair of statements: What the listener knows or what the listener says?

Three- and four-year-olds participated in a referential communication task wherein they requested stickers from a knowledgeable or ignorant adult to complete a card. Following inadequate initial requests children were provided with three different feedback types: goal substitution (i.e. an incorrect sticker was provided), explicit statement of misunderstanding ('I don't know which one you mean'), and vague feedback ('Huh?'). Preschoolers' initial statements revealed sensitivity to the listener's perspective: more descriptors were provided when the listener did not have visual access to the card. Although listener's knowledge did not affect children's repair statements following feedback, the feedback type did: goal substitution elicited more repairs that included new descriptors, whereas vague responses elicited more repetition of initial requests than other feedback types. Children's age and verbal skills were related to the specific repair strategies used. Results demonstrate that preschoolers' use of cues from a conversational partner depends on the type of communicative task.

The Effects of Listener's Familiarity about a Talker on the Free Recall Task of Spoken Words

Several recent studies have examined an interaction between talker's acoustic characteristics and spoken word recognition in speech perception and have shown that listener's familiarity about a talker influences an easiness of spoken word processing. The present study examined the effect of listener's familiarity about talkers on the free recall task of words spoken by two talkers. Subjects participated in three conditions of the task: the listener has (1) explicit knowledge, (2) implicit knowledge, and (3) no knowledge of the talker. In condition (1), subjects were familiar with talker's voices and were initially informed whose voices they would hear. In condition (2), subjects were familiar with talkers' voices but were not informed whose voices they would hear. In condition (3), subjects were entirely unfamiliar with talker's voices and were not informed whose voices they would hear. We analyzed the percentage of correct answers and compared these results across three conditions. We will discuss the possibility of whether a listener's knowledge about the individual talker's acoustic characteristics stored in long term memory could reduce the quantity of the cognitive resources required in the verbal information processing.