MIT Linguistics Colloquium 12/04: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)
Speaker: Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester)
Title: Common ground and perspective-taking in language processing
Time: Friday, December 04, 2009, 3:30pm
Place: 32-141
Successful communication would seem to require that speakers and
listeners distinguish
between their own knowledge, commitments and intentions, and those of their
interlocutors. A particularly important distinction is between shared
knowledge (common
ground) and private knowledge (privileged ground). Keeping track of
what is shared and
what is privileged would seem, however, to be too computationally
expensive and too
memory intensive to inform real-time language processing—a position
supported by
striking experimental evidence that speakers and listeners act
egocentrically, showing
strong and seemingly inappropriate intrusions from their own privileged
ground. I’ll
review recent results from my laboratory demonstrating that (a)
speaker’s utterances
provide evidence about whether they believe information is shared or
privileged and (b)
listeners are extremely sensitive to this evidence. I’ll suggest an
integrative framework
that explains discrepancies in the literature.