Ignorant Speaker Research Articles

Emotion and liking: how director emotional expression and knowledge of (dis)liking may impact adults\u2019 ability to follow the instructions of an ignorant speaker

BackgroundTheory of mind (ToM), the ability to understand that others have different knowledge and beliefs to ourselves, has been the subject of extensive research which suggests that we are not always efficient at taking another’s perspective, known as visual perspective taking (VPT). This has been studied extensively and a growing literature has explored the individual-level factors that may affect perspective taking (e.g. empathy and group membership). However, while emotion and (dis)liking are key aspects within everyday social interaction, research has not hitherto explored how these factors may impact ToM.MethodA total of 164 participants took part in a modified director task (31 males (19%), M age = 20.65, SD age = 5.34), exploring how correct object selection may be impacted by another’s emotion (director facial emotion; neutral × happy × sad) and knowledge of their (dis)likes (i.e. director likes specific objects).ResultWhen the director liked the target object or disliked the competitor object, accuracy rates were increased relative to when he disliked the target object or liked the competitor object. When the emotion shown by the director was incongruent with their stated (dis)liking of an object (e.g. happy when he disliked an object), accuracy rates were also increased. None of these effects were significant in the analysis of response time. These findings suggest that knowledge of liking may impact ToM use, as can emotional incongruency, perhaps by increasing the saliency of perspective differences between participant and director.ConclusionAs well as contributing further to our understanding of real-life social interactions, these findings may have implications for ToM research, where it appears that more consideration of the target/director’s characteristics may be prudent.

Slurs and Expressive Commitments

Most accounts of the derogatory meaning of slurs are semantic. Recently, Nunberg (2018) proposed a purely pragmatic account offering a compelling picture of the relation between derogatory content and social context. Nunberg posits that the semantic content of slurs is identical to that of neutral counterparts, and that derogation is a result of the association of slur use with linguistic conventions of bigoted speakers. The mechanism responsible for it is a special kind of conversational implicature. However, this paper argues that Nunberg’s proposal suffers from technical and conceptual problems regarding the application of the concepts of implicature and convention. It is proposed that the implicature mechanism should be replaced by expressive commitment attribution (developed for expressives in Hess Journal of Pragmatics, 129,13–33 2018, 2019). The account advocated here preserves crucial insights of Nunberg’s analysis (and incorporates elements of other pragmatic accounts, cf. Anderson and Lepore Noûs 47(1), 25–48, 2013a, Analytic Philosophy 54(3), 350–363, 2013b; Bolinger Nous, 51(3), 439–462, 2017), giving them a firmer conceptual basis. It supports a distinction between derogation and offensiveness of slurs that improves on the one proposed by Hom and May (Analytic Philosophy 54(3), 293–313 2013), and sheds light on puzzling borderline cases: the use of slurs by ignorant speakers and controversies surrounding the status of some words as potentially slurs.

Children remember words from ignorant speakers but do not attach meaning: evidence from event‐related potentials

Although we know much about the conditions under which children demonstrate selective social learning, we have a limited understanding of the cognitive mechanisms by which children's selectivity manifests. Here, we report findings from a brain electrophysiological (ERP) study designed to determine the extent to which words presented by ignorant speakers were later both familiar to children and associated with semantic meaning. Forty-eight children (mean age=6.5 years) first experienced novel word training from either a knowledgeable or an ignorant speaker. Children's ERPs were subsequently recorded as they heard a recording of the speaker using the novel word, followed by a picture of either the object the word was paired with during training (congruent) or a distractor object that was also present during training (incongruent). Children trained by a knowledgeable speaker showed both N200 and N400 effects to the incongruent word-referent pairings, thereby suggesting that the novel words were both familiar and bore a semantic association. In contrast, children trained by an ignorant speaker demonstrated only the N200 effect, thereby suggesting that the word-referent links were familiar, but not associated with semantic meaning. These findings provide evidence that selective word learning involves the disruption of processes specifically associated with semantic consolidation of word learning events.

At least ignorance inferences come at a processing cost: Support from eye movements

We present results of an eye-tracking reading study that directly probes ignorance effects of the superlative numeral modifier at least in embedding and unembedding environments. We find that interpreting a numeral (phrase) modified by at least in a context with an ignorant speaker is costlier than in a context with a knowledgeable speaker, regardless of whether at least is in an embedding environment or not. In line with online studies testing scalar implicatures using a similar paradigm, this finding is taken to suggest that the observed processing cost is due to the derivation of ignorance interpretations via a pragmatic mechanism. Our results, given the paradigm we employ, further enable us to adjudicate not only between semantic and pragmatic accounts of ignorance, but also among various pragmatic proposals, favouring neo-Gricean accounts that derive ignorance as a quantity implicature (Büring 2008; Cummins & Katsos 2010; Schwarz 2013; Kennedy 2015). We find no evidence indicating that ignorance with at least in interaction with a universal modal involves an extra operation, like covert movement.

Why are there limits on theory of mind use? Evidence from adults’ ability to follow instructions from an ignorant speaker

Keysar et al. (Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000; Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003) report that adults frequently failed to use their conceptual competence for theory of mind (ToM) in an online communication game where they needed to take account of a speaker's perspective. The current research reports 3 experiments investigating the cognitive processes contributing to adults' errors. In Experiments 1 and 2 the frequency of adults' failure to use ToM was unaffected by perspective switching. In Experiment 3 adults made more errors when interpreting instructions according to the speaker's perspective than according to an arbitrary rule. We suggest that adults are efficient at switching perspectives, but that actually using what another person knows to interpret what they say is relatively inefficient, giving rise to egocentric errors during communication.

How use Theories of Meaning can Accommodate Shared Meanings: A Modal Account of Semantic Deference

Use theories of meaning (UTMs) seem ill-equipped to accommodate the intuition that ignorant but deferential speakers use natural kind terms (e.g. ‘zinc’) and technical expression (e.g. ‘credit default swap’) with the same meanings as the experts do. After all, their use deviates from the experts', and if use determines meaning, a deviant use ordinarily would determine a deviant meaning. Yet the intuition is plausible and advocates of UTMs believe it can be accommodated. I examine Gilbert Harman's and Paul Horwich's views, and argue that they do not offer a satisfactory reconciliation of the intuition with the theory. I propose an accommodation based on a novel account of semantic deference, and show that it is consistent with UTMs that a speaker may use a word with a certain meaning without fully or adequately knowing it.

How children block learning from ignorant speakers

Preschool children typically do not learn words from ignorant or unreliable speakers. Here, we examined the mechanism by which these learning failures occur by modifying the comprehension test procedure that measures word learning. Following lexical training by a knowledgeable or ignorant speaker, 48 preschool-aged children were asked either a standard comprehension test question (i.e., “Which one is the blicket”) or a question about the labeling episode (i.e., “Which one did I say is the blicket”). Immediately after training, children chose the object labeled by an ignorant speaker when asked the episode question, but not when asked the semantic question. However, the advantage for episode questions disappeared when the same children were asked after a brief delay. These findings show that children encode their experiences with ignorant speakers, but do not form semantic representations on the basis of those experiences.

Preschoolers Mistrust Ignorant and Inaccurate Speakers

Being able to evaluate the accuracy of an informant is essential to communication. Three experiments explored preschoolers' (N=119) understanding that, in cases of conflict, information from reliable informants is preferable to information from unreliable informants. In Experiment 1, children were presented with previously accurate and inaccurate informants who presented conflicting names for novel objects. 4-year-olds-but not 3-year-olds-predicted whether an informant would be accurate in the future, sought, and endorsed information from the accurate over the inaccurate informant. In Experiment 2, both age groups displayed trust in knowledgeable over ignorant speakers. In Experiment 3, children extended selective trust when learning both verbal and nonverbal information. These experiments demonstrate that preschoolers have a key strategy for assessing the reliability of information.

Do word learners ignore ignorant speakers?

Thirty-six three- to four-year-old children were tested to assess whether hearing a word-referent link from an ignorant speaker affected children's abilities to subsequently link the same word with an alternative referent offered by another speaker. In the principal experimental conditions, children first heard either an ignorant or a knowledgeable speaker link a novel word with one of three toys. The first speaker's labelling episode was followed by a second in which a different speaker used the same novel label but for a different toy. There was also a Base-line condition which was the same as the experimental condition involving the ignorant speaker except that she did not associate the novel label with a referent. When tested for comprehension of the novel label, children selected the FIRST speaker's toy at high levels when the first speaker was knowledgeable, but selected the SECOND speaker's toy when the first speaker was ignorant. These findings suggest that children's experience with the ignorant speaker did not affect their abilities to learn a subsequently presented alternative word-referent link. These findings are discussed in terms of understanding the mechanisms by which children adapt their word-learning in line with speakers' knowledge states.

Learning words from knowledgeable versus ignorant speakers: links between preschoolers' theory of mind and semantic development.

Two studies addressed whether children consider speakers' knowledge states when establishing initial word-referent links. In Study 1, forty-eight 3- and 4-year-olds were taught two novel words by a speaker who expressed either knowledge or ignorance about the words' referents. Children showed better word learning when the speaker was knowledgeable. In Study 2, forty-eight 3- and 4-year-olds were taught two novel words by a speaker who expressed uncertainty about their referents. Whether the uncertainty truly reflected ignorance, however, differed across conditions. In one condition, the speaker said he made the object himself and thus, he was knowledgeable. In the other condition, the speaker stated that the object was made by a friend and thus, expressed ignorance about it. Four-year-olds learned better in the speaker-made than in the friend-made condition; 3-year-olds, however, showed relatively poor learning in both conditions. These findings suggest that theory-of-mind developments impact word learning.