Is the pan without eggs the same as the empty pan?

How types of modifiers affect choice of referring expression and memory

Danielle Moed

MA Linguistics, University of Toronto

Psycholinguistics Group – Nov 7, 2014

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Overview

• Introduction– Purpose– Lexical versus Contextual Modifiers– Psycholinguistic Research– Representation of Alternatives– Memory Consequences for Inferring Alternatives– Present Study

• Method

• Results

• Discussion

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INTRODUCTION

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What would you call the highlighted bag?

• Referring expressions differ in what information they provide about an entity and indirectly about other entities in the context

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What about these bags?

• Referring expressions do not only reflect the properties of the entities they are used to refer to, but can potentially also be used to infer the properties of other entities

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PURPOSE

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Purpose

• Investigate how and to what extent different referring expressions affect the representation of the properties of unmentioned entities by examining how the production of one referring expression or another affects subsequent memory of these unmentioned entities

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LEXICAL VERSUS CONTEXTUAL MODIFIERS

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Maxim of Quantity

• A speaker should only be as informative as required for the current purposes of the conversation

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Lexical Modifiers

• Adjectives open, empty, …

• Lexical in the sense that the existence of alternatives is part of the lexical meaning of these adjectives

• Gradable Adjectives

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Gradable Adjectives

• Denote properties that are relative to a comparison class (Kennedy, 2007; Kennedy & McNally, 2005).

The wine glass is full.

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But wait!

• Important to note that not all adjectives are lexical modifiers

• Alternatives are not part of the lexical meaning of all adjectives

• Esp. those adjectives that denote colour, shape, pattern and material – These can be considered to be contextual

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Non-lexical Adjectives

• Could be said to be contextual

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Contextual Modifiers

• PPs without asparagus, …

• Contextual in the sense that the lexical meaning of the modifier does not encode the alternative, but rather an alternative can be inferred from the context

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PSYCHOLINGUISTIC RESEARCH

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Contrastive Interpretation in Context Despite Lexical Differences

• Sedivy, Tanenhaus, Chambers and Carlson (1999)– Visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to determine how and when

listeners use a contextually available contrast set when interpreting non-contrastive adjectives (i.e., colour/size)

• Result: – 1B: Eye-movement latencies and the likelihood of looks to the non-

target objects indicated that listeners initially expect a contrastive interpretation for non-contrastive adjectives if there was another object in the display from the same nominal category

– 2: Results of this experiment revealed that listeners interpreted the scalar adjective contrastively, anticipating the referent to be apart of a contrast set.

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But…

• Heller and Chambers (2014) found differences between adjectives that encode a comparison class and those that do not

• Examined reference to objects that contrasted along two dimensions (i.e., colour and size), examining how an earlier produced referring expression for an object affects later reference to another object

• Results showed that that colour adjectives (e.g., blue) were less sensitive to the comparison class compared to size adjectives (e.g., large).

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Sedivy et al. VS. Heller & Chambers

• Sedivy et al., (1999) who put colour and size adjectives on unequal footing and found that listeners expected alternatives for colour and size adjectives

• Heller and Chambers (2014), who put colour and size adjective on equal footing in their experiment, found that colour adjectives were less likely than size adjectives to introduce alternatives

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What does this suggest?

• These results suggest that even when the visual context provides explicit alternatives, the inherent semantic contrastiveness supersedes the contextual influence.

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REPRESENTATION OF ALTERNATIVES

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Inferring Alternatives

• Computing alternatives involves combining linguistic information with information from context and world knowledge

• Normally alternatives are not explicitly given, must be inferred

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Explicit Alternatives

• But Cohen (1999) notes that alternatives can be explicit!

• Raises interesting question about the similarities and differences between inferred and explicit alternatives

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MEMORY CONSEQUENCES FOR INFERRING ALTERNATIVES

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Memory & Alternatives

• Testing for memory can reveal what has been computed, specifically showing which alternatives are available

• Fraundorf, Watson & Benjamin (2010)

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Contrastive Stress & Memory

A. Both the British and the French biologists had been searching Malaysia and Indonesia for the endangered monkeys.

B. Finally, the (British/French) spotted one of the monkeys in (Malaysia/Indonesia) and planted a radio tag on it.

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Contrastive Stress & Memory

• Results from a recognition memory tests indicated that contrastive stress increased the likelihood that listeners would remember the correct statements (i.e., the likelihood of hits), as well as the likelihood of correct rejections.

• Suggests that alternatives are inferred and represented, leading to better memory for those alternatives

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PRESENT STUDY

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The three kinds of modifier types

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METHOD

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Participants

• Present data from 30 English speaking participants from the University of Toronto Community

• 35 participants tested, but 5 were excluded from analysis

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Materials and Procedure

• Study contained 3 tasks:1. Referential Communication Task

2. Distractor Task

3. Memory Task

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REFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION TASK

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Experimental Materials

• Experimental Trials (18)– 6 in each of the 3 conditions:

• i.e., 6 contextual, 6 lexical & 6 both

– Each display contained 4 images• 2 formed pair (referent & alternative)• 2 distractor images

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Experimental Display

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Lists• 3 lists (List A, B, C)

– Eliminate overlap of experimental items

• Example: “Bag”List A: Lexical List B: Contextual List C: Both

Referent Alternative Referent Alternative Referent Alternative

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Filler Materials

• Filler Trails (82)– Similar to experimental displays

– Each display contained 4 images• 2 formed pair• 2 distractor images

– 26 trials required modification• Referent was a member of pair

– 54 trials did not require modification• Referent was a distractor image

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Filler Display: Modification

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Filler Display: No Modification

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Procedure• Participant played a game with the experimenter to get

the experimenter to click on the picture

Participant

Experimenter (Addressee)Click on

the empty bag

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DISTRACTOR TASK

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Distractor (Math) Task

• Materials:– 12 math sheets ( 4: +, 4: - & 4: +/-)

• Procedure: – Complete as many +/- equations as possible

in 10 minutes

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MEMORY TASK

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Experimental Materials

• 1 image per display (from relevant list)

• 2 displays for each experimental trial – 1 “seen” image – 1 foil image

• Example (Both condition)

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Seen Image Example

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Foil Image Example

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Lists

• Related to Referential Communication Task (i.e., List A, B, C)

• Arranged in 2 blocks (e.g., List A1, A2…)

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Filler Materials

• 1 image per display

• 2 displays for each experimental trial – 1 “seen” image – 1 foil image

• R Trials: “seen” image = referent• D Trials: “seen” image = distractor image

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Procedure

• Participants click “I saw this” or “I did not see this”

I saw this I did not see this

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RESULTS

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REFERENTIAL COMMUNICATION TASK

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Predictions

• Lexical Condition: Preference for producing lexical modifiers (e.g., open bag)

• Contextual Condition: Preference for producing contextual modifiers (e.g., bag with corn)

• Both Condition: No preference for producing lexical or contextual modifiers (e.g., empty bag/bag without asparagus)

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Syntactic Form Analysis• Bare Nouns: whether the referring expression only included a noun in addition to

the determiner (e.g., the flower) or the noun was a compound noun (e.g., the walking sign). 1 iff the noun is bare and 0 iff the noun is modified.

 • Adjectival Phrase (AP): whether the referring expression contained a prenominal

adjectival modifier (e.g., the yellow flower). 1 iff the modifier was an adjective and 0 iff the modifier was not an adjective. Note that if the adjective appeared in a post-nominal relative clause (e.g. the vase that’s broken), it was coded as 0 here.

 • Prepositional Phrase (PP): whether the referring expression contained a modifier

that is a prepositional phrase (e.g., the vase without a flower). 1 iff the modifier was a PP and 0 iff the modifier was not a PP.

 • Relative Clause (RC): whether the referring expression contained a relative clause

(e.g., the vase that’s broken). Note that the relative clause could contain an adjective (e.g., the bag that was open). 1 iff the modifier was a relative clause and 0 iff the modifier was not a relative clause.

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Mean likelihood of the different modifier forms by condition

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Semantic Form Analysis

• Lexical Modification: 1 iff the modifier in the referring expressions was such where alternatives are part of the lexical meaning of that modifier. For example, gradable adjectives like open or empty whose interpretation depends on a comparison class.

• Contextual Modification: 1 iff the modifier in the referring expression was such that the information in the modifier allowed discriminating the images in the context, but its lexical meaning did not imply an alternative. This includes cases where the modifier explicitly mentions a property of the referent (e.g., bread with butter), or where it implies a property of the alternative (e.g., bread without peanut butter). In both cases, one can only infer that the alternative does not have the property of the referent.

 

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Mean likelihood of lexical and contextual modifiers

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MEMORY TASK

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Memory Task

• Goal: Test our hypothesis that lexical and contextual modifiers lead to different representations of alternatives, which may affect speakers’ ability to remember them later.

• We looked at how well participants recognized the alternative images versus how likely they were to misremember a similar image that they have never seen.

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Signal Detection Theory

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Predictions

• Lexical modification leads to better memory– Alternatives are part of lexical meaning– Informativeness

OR

• Contextual modification leads to better memory– Negative property in modifier (e.g., … without

asparagus) = more informative

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Mean Likelihood of a Hit/False Alarm by Condition

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Mean Likelihood of a Hit/False Alarm by Modification Type

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Mean Response Time (ms) for a Hit/False Alarm by Modification Type by Condition

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DISCUSSION

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Goal 1

• To examine how speakers conceptualize a referent in an alternative set; first, by looking at how this conceptualization is reflected in their choice of a referring expression.

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What we found

• Lexical modifiers in the lexical condition

• Contextual modifiers in the contextual condition

• No preference for lexical VS contextual modifiers in the both condition

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The alternation between lexical and contextual modifiers

• Visual attention during language planning?

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Goal 2

• To examine how the type of modification speakers produced affected their memory for an unmentioned alternative.

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What we found

• Crucially

Memory was better when individuals produced a contextual modifier versus a

lexical modifier (in the both condition)

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Why do contextual modifiers better memory?

• Informativity?

• Non-linguistic phenomenon?– Visual Attention

Or is it something else?

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Representation of language affects memory?

• Informativity of referring expressions

• How people conceptualize relationships between entities how informative those relationships are

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