Understanding Of Utterances Research Articles

Privileged versus shared knowledge about object identity in real-time referential processing

A central claim in research on interactive conversation is that listeners use the knowledge assumed to be shared with a conversational partner to guide their understanding of utterances from the earliest moments of processing. In the present study we investigated whether this claim extends to cases where shared vs. private knowledge is discrepant in terms of the identity assigned to a mutually seen object that could be misidentified on the basis of its appearance. Eye movement measures were used to evaluate listeners’ ability to integrate a speaker’s perspective as they identified the referent for an unfolding expression. The results reconfirmed previous findings showing that listeners can rapidly take into account a speaker’s awareness of the existence/presence of a referential object. In contrast, however, listeners showed strong consideration of their private knowledge about the identity of an object during referential processing. Strikingly, this tendency was found even when speaker-produced discourse reinforced the way in which the speaker’s understanding of the object’s identity differed from that of the listener. Together, the results reveal clear and important differences in the way in which distinct types of perspective-based cues are integrated in real-time communicative interaction.

The intersubjectivity of delusions.

The intersubjectivity of delusions.

Constructing the context through goals and schemata: top-down processes in comprehension and beyond

My main purpose here is to provide an account of context selection in utterance understanding in terms of the role played by schemata and goals in top-down processing. The general idea is that information is organized hierarchically, with items iteratively organized in chunks—here called “schemata”—at multiple levels, so that the activation of any items spreads to schemata that are the most accessible due to previous experience. The activation of a schema, in turn, activates its other components, so as to predict a likely context for the original item. Since each input activates its own schemata, conflicting schemata compete with (and inhibit) each other, while multiple activations of a schema raise its likelihood to win the competition. There is therefore a double movement—with bottom-up activation of schemata enabling top-down prediction of other contextual components—triggered by multiple sources. Another claim of the paper is that goals are represented by schemata placed at the highest-levels of the executive hierarchy, in accordance with Fuster’s model of the brain as a hierarchically organized perception-action cycle. This account can be considered, in part at least, a development of ideas contained in Relevance Theory, though it may imply that some other claims of the theory are in need of revision. Therefore, a secondary purpose of the paper is a contribution to the analysis of that theory.

Pragmatics and mindreading: Forward and backward inferences in shared intentional contexts

AbstractThe general hypothesis discussed here is that pragmatic understanding is embedded in a more general understanding of action. To this purpose I first summarize ideas from Grice, Levinson and relevance theorists, all contributing to the view that utterance understanding is based on inferential recognition of the speakers’ communicative goals, and that this process may be affected backwards by expectations about non-communicative goals. I also provide reasons to think that the double dynamic of forward and backward inferences described by relevance theorists is present in action execution and observation as well, and that we construe shared intentional contexts which automatically mesh ours and others’ goals. Finally, the suggestion is made that, in order to account for the full contribution of mindreading to utterance understanding, Relevance Theory needs to consider not only the comprehension procedure in itself, but also the way in which it interacts with other external mechanisms.

Mishearings are occasioned by contextual assumptions and situational affordances

This article is an empirical study of 220 mishearings in Swedish conversations. A mishearing is defined as a specific perception that appears in a hearer's mind immediately after a speaker's source utterance, and is lexically discrepant from what the speaker actually said.Starting from a dialogical meta-theory, the paper is a study of how mishearings are nearly always situation-appropriate; they invoke relevant contextual assumptions. A systematic coding of mishearings yield a classification based on types and subtypes of participants' references to current topic, situational referents and other topics near-at-hand.At a theoretical level, this article has ramifications for a general theory of utterance understanding, and also more specifically for the theorising of repair and misunderstanding.

New feature weighting approaches for speech-act classification

Speech-act classification is essential to generation and understanding of utterances within a natural language dialogue system since the speech-act of an utterance is closely tied to a user intention. The binary feature weighting scheme has mainly been used for speech-act classification because traditional feature weighting schemes such as tf.idf are not effective in speech-act classification due to the short length of utterances. This paper studies two effective feature weighting schemes using the category distributions of features: (1) the first one exploits the entropy of whole category distributions and (2) the second one the log-odds ratio of positive and negative category distributions. As a result, the proposed schemes show significant improvement on SVM and k-NN classifiers in our experiments.

The Effect of Nonverbal Cues on the Interpretation of Utterances by People with Visual Impairments

Introduction The purpose of this article is to explore the effect of nonverbal information (gestures and facial expressions) provided in real time on the interpretation of utterances by people with total blindness. Methods The article reports on an exploratory study performed on two groups of participants with visual impairments who were tested on their ability to interpret short dialogues provided as a recording with or without audio description (AD). The AD supplied additional information about gestures and facial expressions performed by speakers in the dialogues. The performance of the visually impaired participants was compared with participants who were sighted. Results There were no significant differences in the interpretation of the dialogues between the two groups of participants. No significant differences were found between the participants with visual impairments who were and were not provided with AD. Discussion The findings lend support for the premise that people with visual impairments are able to make correct assumptions about intentions, feelings, and attitudes of other people on the basis of available information during communication. The results also suggest that the lack of direct access to gestures and facial expressions during communication does not tend to impair the understanding of utterances by people who are blind.

A Semiotic Analysis of If we are holding hands, whose hand am I holding?

This paper presents a system which asserts understanding of complex utterances by semiotic analysis. The question in the title was chosen because: it enquires about a conceptual state of affairs, referring to in two ways; and reaches an answer by subtracting I from we to get the unspoken you. The system introduces concepts, that about which we can speak, defined by repertoires in natural language, including phrasal analysis patterns. The repertoire conceptualization grounds it on a state of affairs against which reasoning can be performed. On matching an utterance, associated intentions are internally vocalized; thus, concepts are informed by more specific concepts. The repertoire conceptualism allows hypothetical states of affairs to be constructed, such as in the title question.

Understanding as Knowledge of Meaning

AbstractTestimony, the transmission of knowledge through communication, requires a shared understanding of linguistic expressions and utterances of them. Is this understanding itself a kind of knowledge, knowledge of meaning? The intuitive answer is ‘yes’, but the nature of such knowledge is controversial, as is the assumption that understanding is a kind of knowledge at all. This article is a critical examination of recent work on the nature and role of semantic knowledge in the generation of the linguistic understanding needed for testimony. After describing a default view – that linguistic understanding partially consists in the possession and application of knowledge of a compositional theory of truth conditions – it scrutinizes two recent charges against this view: that linguistic understanding and knowledge of meaning are conceptually distinct, and that semantic ‘knowledge’ is knowledge without an object.

Hesitation in communication: Does minority status delay responses?

Past studies indicated that people in a minority (vs. majority) position are slower to express their public/political opinion, and the larger the difference between the size of the two positions, the slower the response. Bassili termed this the minority-slowness effect (MSE). In the current study, two experiments were conducted to demonstrate that MSE extends to people's understanding of utterances and explored the cognitive basis for this. Participants were asked to judge if an utterance is a ‘direct’ or an ‘indirect’ expression. The results show that participants in the minority (vs. majority) took longer to respond, and the larger the difference between the size of majority and minority, the longer the response latency (Study 1a). Furthermore, participants were aware of their own minority position (Study 1b). In Study 2, when participants were deprived of cognitive resources, MSE disappeared, presumably because participants lack the cognitive resources required to conform to utterance interpretation as favoured by the majority.

Spontaneous Linguistic Understanding: a few Introductory Remarks

Let me try to explain from the outset what I mean by “spontaneous linguistic understanding” (SLU). As a first approximation, it is the non-reflexive, fluent, direct and mostly non-inferential process by which a speaker-hearer dynamically, by considering usually stretches of discourse rather than isolated sentences, determines the intuitive truth conditions (or, in general, the satisfaction conditions) of the utterances performed in a specific context of use. Most people on Earth enjoy that kind of experience all the time in their mother tongue. The view of SLU I shall try to develop here takes actions and plans as a starting point, that is, utterances usually performed as part of bigger plans. Rarely do we perform isolated actions; our actions, as a rule, are parts of plans, steps towards the achievement of a project. This, of course, holds for sequences of speech acts in a discourse or conversation. As there are always different ways to perform the same act-type, it is no surprise that there may be different ways to perform any speech act-type. 1 Utterances are actions, and SLU, as we shall see, is tied to occurrent understanding of utterances. SLU is also a dynamic process that considers a topic that can be developed in different ways. However, it is obvious that what has been said in a discourse or a conversation smoothly restricts what can be relevantly said soon afterwards. In this process, truth conditions are grasped, especially those actually grasped and considered by the

Is Korean Really a Listener-Responsible Language like Japanese?: A Contrastive Analysis of Discourse in Apologies between Korean and Japanese

According to Hinds’ typology of languages on discourse level, Japanese and Korean are both considered listener-responsible languages, whereas English is classified as a speaker-responsible language (Hinds, 1987). However, in conversation, Yoon (2009) demonstrated that Korean should be classified as a speaker-responsible language based on her contrastive analysis of daily conversations between married couples in Japanese and Korean, where address terms and fillers are used as contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1982) to convey a speaker's intention to the interlocutor metacommunicatively. The purpose of the present study is to show that Japanese is listener-responsible, while Korean is a speaker-responsible language on the level of conversational communication. In order to test the hypothesis, surveys and recordings of real conversations of Japanese and Korean people were conducted and analyzed.The informants in the present study consisted of four groups: Japanese university students who live in their own country, Japanese university students who live in the U.S., Korean university students who live in their own country and Korean university students who live in the U.S. A Discourse Complete Test (DCT) was completed by Japanese and Korean university students to compare the differences in speaker responsibility in apologies. The results suggest that Korean should be classified as a speaker-responsible language for understanding in conversations, since Korean speakers produce many more utterances and convey more information per utterance to the interlocutor than Japanese speakers. Furthermore, it is found that the responsibility for the understanding of utterances correlate with daily use of American English, especially in the case of Japanese university students.

Cognitive Pragmatics Ways into Discourse Analysis: the Case of Discursive Presuppostions

This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, focusing on the links between the process of utterance understanding, which is in the scope of pragmatic theories, and consenting to beliefs (influence), which is in the scope of Discourse Analysis (section 2). Next (section 3), we introduce an extended notion of presuppositions which we name discursive presuppositions, which are unexpressed contents but nonetheless propositions that need to be incorporated in the background and thus consented to in order to provide not meaning proper but relevance to the utterance. Last section (section 4) is dedicated to the examination of two examples where discursive presuppositions are exploited in persuasiveness.

Incremental interpretation and prediction of utterance meaning for interactive dialogue


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 We present techniques for the incremental interpretation and prediction of utterance meaning in dialogue systems. These techniques open possibilities for systems to initiate responsive overlap behaviors during user speech, such as interrupting, acknowledging, or completing a user's utterance while it is still in progress. In an implemented system, we show that relatively high accuracy can be achieved in understanding of spontaneous utterances before utterances are completed. Further, we present a method for determining when a system has reached a point of maximal understanding of an ongoing user utterance, and show that this determination can be made with high precision. Finally, we discuss a prototype implementation that shows how systems can use these abilities to strategically initiate system completions of user utterances. More broadly, this framework facilitates the implementation of a range of overlap behaviors that are common in human dialogue, but have been largely absent in dialogue systems.

Understanding Expressive Speech Acts: The Role of Prosody and Situational Context in French-Speaking 5- to 9-Year-Olds

This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend & J. Bryant, 2000)? In the first experiment, a group of 5- to 9-year-old children and a group of adults performed a computerized judgment task. They had to determine the speaker's intention on the basis of an utterance produced with a particular prosody (positive or negative) in a particular situational context (positive or negative). In the second experiment, the same prosodic utterances were presented to 5- to 9-year-old children without a situational context. The 5- and 7-year-old children relied primarily on situational context, in contrast to adults, who relied on prosody. The 9-year-olds relied on both cues (Experiment 1). When prosody was the sole cue (Experiment 2), all children relied on this cue to infer the speaker's intention. The results are discussed and integrated into a larger conceptual framework that includes research on lexical bias and sarcasm.

Intonation, contexte et interaction. Sur quels indices les enfants comprennent-ils l'intention du locuteur ?

This study investigates the contribution of intonation and context in the understanding of utterances presented in a situational context. In order to find out whether intonation is the sole cue, we separated the intonation from the content of utterances (meaningless syllables). Five- to nine-year old children and a group of adults performed a computerized story-completion task, using multimedia, combining sound and image. This task required them to determine the speaker's intention. In Experiment 1, the stories vary according to intonation (positive vs negative) and context (positive vs negative), generated two types of situations: congruent situations in which the context and the intonation pointed to the same interpretation of the utterance, and incongruent situations in which the context and the intonation pointed to two contradictory interpretations of the utterance. In Experiment 2, cues (intonation and context) are not in competition anymore. Results show that in incongruent situations, the five- and seven-year-olds did not base their interpretation of the utterances on intonation; the opposite was found for the adult group. The nine-year-old started to take intonation into account. However, when the prosodic cue is the sole source of information (Experiment 2), the seven-year-olds are able to take intonation into account.

Mathematics and Mathematics Education as Triadic Communication? a Semiotic Framework Exemplified

The article investigates in the first part critically dyadic and essentialist understanding of signs and utterances in mathematics and mathematics education as opposed to a triadic view. However even Peircean semiotics, giving priority to triadic, dynamic sign may face challenges, such as explaining the sign as a pragmatic act and how signs are related to context. To meet these and other hurdles an explicit communicational, pragmatic and triadic view, found in parts of the works of Buhler, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Halliday, is developed. Two basic principles are combined and established in a theoretical framework. Firstly, whenever uttering, there will exist in any semiotic sign system, dynamic reciprocity and simultaneity between expressing through form, referring to content, and addressing as an act. Secondly, meaning will be created by the dynamics between given and new in utterances and between utterances and contextual genres. The latter principle explains how meaning merge in communication dynamically and create the basis for a discursive understanding of semiosis and hence even learning at large. The second part exemplifies each of the three main aspects and the dynamics of utterance and genre and given and new by excerpts from a textbook in mathematics education. The concept ‘positioning’, in use for operationalisation, is explained in relation to main principles of the framework. The article ends focusing crucial implications for validation when moving from a dyadic to a triadic understanding of mathematics and mathematics education.

“How does the Cognitive Science of Religion Stack Up as a Big Theory, À La Hume?”

ion has proved invaluable. But one cannot infer from Chomsky's work, for example, that because our language performance depends on a language competence, that therefore the best model for understanding utterances is that we formulate representations of sentences and then use our will to make them public. And a full theory of language must complement Chomsky's generative theory with an account of the situ ation in which we speak and the meaning of utterances. Often we blurt things out. It is usually in the attempt to express in thought or writ ing that the ideas we are trying to bring out are clarified and shaped. Language competence is stored in individual minds, but language is irreducibly social. I am arguing that our gain in knowledge by abstract ing ritual competence from ritual performance does not justify the assumption that in action, including ritual action, what happens is that people read off their representations as blueprints that their actions put into play. Human agency requires more than competence. It is important to recall how young the cognitive science of religion is. It was launched in 1990 by Lawson and McCauley's book on ritual. Much of the empirical cognitive basis has been driven by the work of Justin Barrett, a psychologist, whose work only began to appear in 1996. It may, then, simply be too early for this approach to attempt a comprehensive theory of religion. That does not stop it from claiming to have done so (see Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained). Some of the grander claims for its achievements may be in danger of crowding out honest and hard reflections on the comprehensiveness of what has been done so far, reflections that will be the stimulus to further success. Theodore Vial, Iliff School of Theology 2201 S. University Blvd Denver, CO 80210

Exploring human error recovery strategies: Implications for spoken dialogue systems

In this study, an explorative experiment was conducted in which subjects were asked to give route directions to each other in a simulated campus (similar to Map Task). In order to elicit error handling strategies, a speech recogniser was used to corrupt the speech in one direction. This way, data could be collected on how the subjects might recover from speech recognition errors. This method for studying error handling has the advantages that the level of understanding is transparent to the analyser, and the errors that occur are similar to errors in spoken dialogue systems. The results show that when subjects face speech recognition problems, a common strategy is to ask task-related questions that confirm their hypothesis about the situation instead of signalling non-understanding. Compared to other strategies, such as asking for a repetition, this strategy leads to better understanding of subsequent utterances, whereas signalling non-understanding leads to decreased experience of task success.

Parallélisme et linéarité de l’interprétation : remarques sur un cas de causalité implicite

Parallelism and linearity of utterance interpretation : a case study with implicit causality. Within the framework of Relevance Theory, this paper addresses the distinction between explicatures and implicatures through a theoretical case study, where a causal implicature determines the temporal reference of the current utterance, which is generally understood as part of its explicatures. Following the discussions on the explicit-implicit distinction in the recent works of Carston (2002) and Recanati (2002a), we suggest that the distinction between articulated and unarticulated constituents may be more operative when considering the cognitive process of utterance understanding. We assume that these two levels of utterance meaning are recovered through parallel processing with information exchanges.