Collection 1: The basics of you- vs. I-centered self-talk

  

We use this collection to elicit the basic distinctions of you- vs. I-centered self-talk. That is, English speakers engaged in self-talk can refer to themselves with either I or you (I am an idiot vs. You are an idiot) However, some constructions disallow one or the other. For example, imperatives and vocatives require you-centered self-talk (Clean up after yourself. Martina, you are an idiot) while verbs of cognition require I-centered self-talk (I can't believe my luck).

In this series the speech bubbles are not filled as we have only used them in field-work contexts where the field-worker will present the target sentence.

Variables we control in all scenarios include social vs. self-talk. For social talk we vary who is speaking and for self-talk we vary presence and absence of a mirror. 

Collection 2: Rising intonation in self-talk

We use this collection to test the use of rising intonation in self-talk. It can be used as a production task (recording native speakers) or as a perception task (playing different recordings and have participants judge the well-formedness of the utterance in the context).

The speech bubbles are filled with the target utterance. This is because for the analysis of the intonational contour we need a suitable carrier sentence.

The variables we control for are self-talk vs. social interaction, as well as epistemic modality (how certain one is) and bouletic modality (how much one wants a positive or negative answer).

Collection 3: Evidentials in self-talk

 

We use this collection to test the use of evidentials in self-talk. It can be used as a production task (having native speakers provide an utterance in the speech bubble) or as a judgement task (have participants judge the well-formedness of the utterance in the context).

The speech bubbles are filled with the basic utterance without an evidential to show the researcher the intended target utterance. For the judgement task the utterance will have to be modified to contain the targeted evidential.  

The variables we control for are self-talk vs. social interaction, as well as the trustworthiness of the source.