LLS Colloquium: If you don't have anything nice (or interesting!) to say, don't say anything at all

On Wednesday 10 March 2021 Hannah Rohde (University of Edinburgh) will be presenting at the LLS Colloquium series, with a talk titled "If you don't have anything nice (or interesting!) to say, don't say anything at all".

If you don't have anything nice (or interesting!) to say, don't say anything at all

This talk considers the role of predictability in models of communication, asking how knowledge of the world influences people's predictions about the content of what a speaker will say. Communication depends in part on the hope that people will tell us things we're interested in hearing. In this sense, language can be understood as a channel by which speakers convey, among other things, newsworthy and informative messages (i.e., content that is otherwise unpredictable to the comprehender). We therefore might expect comprehenders to show a preference for such messages. However, research on language comprehension often points to a preference for the opposite (i.e., processing ease for real-world predictable content). Several decades of research have shown that comprehenders can deploy knowledge about situation plausibility to generate fine-grained context-driven predictions about upcoming words.  This talk introduces evidence that comprehenders can also deploy this knowledge in favor of newsworthy content---distinguishing between expectations about what a speaker is likely to encounter in the world and what they are likely to *say* about it. The results discussed in this talk are compatible with models that describe comprehension as a process of reverse engineering a speaker's production process. The findings highlight that not only do comprehenders need to update their mental model of the situation being described, but they also need to resolve why a speaker would have chosen to talk about that situation in the first place.

The talk will take place at 4pm on Zoom, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end. To join: click on this link.

Event poster: If you don't have anything nice (or interesting!) to say, don't say anything at all