Project Details
Projekt
Processing speaker's meaning: Epistemic state, cooperation, commitment
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Petra Schumacher
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2014 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 254822891
This project seeks to advance our knowledge of the online comprehension of speaker's meaning, i.e. the identification and if necessary reconstruction of the mental representation and intentions of the speaker when making a particular utterance. Our research in experimental pragmatics departs from two distinct points of view. The first line of investigation pursues the role of particular pragmatic aspects of speaker's meaning in language processing, including epistemic states, cooperation, reliability and commitment. The second line seeks to assess and advance a neuro-cognitively plausible model of language comprehension and its predictions for pragmatic processing. In previous research on perspective-based reasoning, we have seen that speaker-specific epistemic states affect language comprehension, that different knowledge states are taken into consideration in offline truth value judgment, and that perspective taking changes over time. In this project phase, we plan to further explore the source for these processing effects as well as the temporal dynamics of perspective-based reasoning. We also want to expand the research on speaker-specific effects to situations in which the speaker might be expected to blatantly violate the first submaxim of Quality ('do not say what you believe to be false'), i.e. when she is known as a notorious liar or comedian and to situations in which there is reasonable doubt that the speaker adheres to the maxim of Quality. Crucially, the research question we pursue through this line of research is to find out whether the consequences of these speaker-specific traits are computed in parallel and result in early modifications of what is to be expected from a cooperative speaker or whether quality inferences are computed automatically and a switch to a non-bona-fide mode is initiated subsequently. We also investigate speaker's perspective and truth conditional commitment through the processing of conventional implicatures involved in narrowing, ordering and expressive content. This will allow us to identify potential similarities and differences in the processing of different implicatures, which may be of qualitative or quantitative nature. This project is integral to the common goals of the Priority Program 1727 'XPrag.de: New Pragmatic Theories based on Experimental Evidence' by using diverse experimental methods to address questions of pragmatic processing. It combines behavioral data from truth value judgment tasks with time-sensitive measures from electrophysiology, mouse tracking and speed accuracy trade-off. It attends to new aspects of speaker's meaning and seeks to identify the commonalities and differences of different pragmatic mechanisms. It is further essential for the goal of XPrag.de to formulate a biologically plausible language architecture on the basis of real-time comprehension data.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
