Knowledge likely held by others affects speakers’ choices of referential expressions at different stages of discourse

ABSTRACT

Effective communication requires adjusting one’s discourse to be understood by the addressee. While some suggest that choices of referring expressions are dependent on the addressee’s accessibility to the referent, there is also evidence for an egocentric bias in speech production. This study relied on two new experimental tasks designed to assess whether speakers adapt their choices of referential expressions when introducing movie characters that are either likely known or likely unknown by their addressee, and when maintaining or reintroducing these characters at a later point in the discourse. Results revealed an adjustment to the addressee in the use of character’s names (increased for likely known characters) and definite expressions (increased for likely unknown characters) observed at all the discourse stages. Use of indefinite expressions and names was affected by the participant’s own knowledge specifically when introducing the characters. These results indicate that speakers take their addressee’s likely knowledge into account at multiple discourse stages.

KEYWORDS:

• Reference markers
• discourse
• interactive task
• common ground
• audience design

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Jacinthe Bédard-Lacroix, Marie-Audrey Lavoie and Laurence Brunelle-Haman for their help with the administration of the protocol and Sophie Couture and Jessie Cadoret for scoring the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanity Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under [grant number #410-2011-1628]. AMA is supported by a salary award from Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQ-S).