Talking in another person’s shoes: Incremental perspective-taking in language processing

Abstract

Language use in conversation is fundamentally incremental, and is guided by the representations that interlocutors maintain of each others knowledge and beliefs. While there is a consensus that interlocutors represent the perspective of others, three candidate models, a Perspective-Adjustment model, an Anticipation-Integration model, and a Constraint-Based model, make conflicting predictions about the role of perspective information during on-line language processing. Here we review psycholinguistic evidence for incrementality in language processing, and the recent methodological advance that has fostered its investigationthe use of eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm. We present visual world studies of perspective-taking, and evaluate each model's account of the data. We argue for a Constraint-Based view in which perspective is one of multiple probabilistic constraints that guide language processing decisions. Addressees combine knowledge of a speakers perspective with rich information from the discourse context to arrive at an interpretation of what was said. Understanding how these sources of information combine to influence interpretation requires careful consideration of how perspective representations were established, and how they are relevant to the communicative context.

Publisher

Linguistic Society of America

Publication Date

1-1-2011

Publication Title

Dialogue & Discourse

Department

Psychology

Document Type

Article

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS