Unpacking Efficient Communication: The Roles of Cognitive Bias and Extralinguistic Context in Referring Expression Choice

Registration        Program        Practical information        Call for papers

When: April 18-19, 2024

Where: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Poblenou Campus, c/Roc Boronat 138, 08018 Barcelona

Invited speakers:

Lilia Rissman, Rochester Institute of Technology

Paula Rubio-Fernández, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Sina Zarrieß, University of Bielefeld

Language offers a rich set of lexical and syntactic options for reference, reflecting the different ways we can choose to identify, describe, categorize, and differentiate the entities and events we talk about. For example, in any given context, a speaker can choose between a more or less specific expression (the dog, the spotted dog, the Dalmatian), or between expressions that convey complementary information about the referent (the woman, the skier). A well-established line of research highlights the role of efficiency in referring expression choice. But what makes a referring expression “efficient”? Efficiency in communication has frequently characterized in terms of an informativity/effort trade-off, with informativity operationalized in terms of inference, and effort, in terms of cognitive or physical cost (Horn 1984, Levshina 2021). However, there is also evidence that other factors such as the salience of visual features (e.g., color, Rubio-Fernández 2016) or the prototypicality of an entity as an exemplar of a category (see, e.g., Degen, et al. 2020) can lead speakers to use expressions that are, strictly speaking, overinformative in the narrowest sense of the term. Efficiency can also be examined at the level of the whole system; for instance, Brochhagen and Boleda (2022) argue that the informativity/effort trade-off helps explain cross-linguistic patterns in colexification, or how meanings are organized in the lexicon. 

The goal of this workshop, supported by the Spanish AEI-funded CORE project (“COntextual effects in the choice of Referring Expressions for visually presented entities”, PID2020-112602GB-I00), is to dig deeper into what makes a linguistic expression “efficient”, considering factors such as: 

  • Cognitive biases that influence the potential for rapid/efficient discrimination.

  • Potential for exploiting inferences due to choice of one expression vs. another.

  • Information load a referring expression has to bear given extralinguistic sources of information in the context, especially visual information.

  • Lexical/constructional frequency effects and association strength between RE options and the referent in question.

The workshop aims to give a forum to new and especially exploratory research in this area. The workshop will include a combination of invited talks, presentations of ongoing research by project members, as well as presentations and posters selected in an open call.

Contact e-mail address: [email protected]

Organizers: Louise McNally, Gemma Boleda, Jialing Liang, Eleonora Gualdoni, Marina Bolea.

References:

  • Degen, J., Hawkins, R. D., Graf, C., Kreiss, E., & Goodman, N. D. (2020). When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to “overinformative” referring expressions. Psychological Review, 127(4), 591–621.

  • Gualdoni, E., T. Brochhagen, A. Mädebach, G. Boleda. 2023. What's in a name? A large-scale computational study on how competition between names affects naming variation. Journal of Memory and Language, 133, 104459.

  • Brochhagen, T., G. Boleda. 2022. When do languages use the same word for different meanings? The Goldilocks Principle in colexification. Cognition, 226, 105179. 

  • Horn, L.R. (1984). Towards a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In Schiffrin, D. (ed.), Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications, 11-42. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC. Levshina, N. (2023). Communicative efficiency: Language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Rissman, L., & Lupyan, G. (2022). A Dissociation Between Conceptual Prominence and Explicit Category Learning: Evidence From Agent and Patient Event Roles. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(7):1707-1732.

  • Rubio-Fernandez, P., Mollica, F., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2021). Speakers and listeners exploit word order for communicative efficiency: A cross-linguistic investigation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(3), 583–594.

  • Schüz, S., Han, T., Zarrieß, S. (2021) Diversity as a By-Product: Goal-oriented Language Generation Leads to Linguistic Variation. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue. Association for Computational Linguistics.