Extending Situated Language Comprehension (Accounts) with Speaker and Comprehender Characteristics: Toward Socially Situated Interpretation

Abstract

More and more findings suggest a tight temporal coupling between (non-linguistic) socially interpreted context and language processing. Still, real-time language processing accounts remain largely elusive with respect to the influence of biological (e.g., age) and experiential (e.g., world and moral knowledge) comprehender characteristics and the influence of the 'socially interpreted' context, as for instance provided by the speaker. This context could include actions, facial expressions, a speaker's voice or gaze, and gestures among others. We review findings from social psychology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics to highlight the relevance of (the interplay between) the socially interpreted context and comprehender characteristics for language processing. The review informs the extension of an extant real-time processing account (already featuring a coordinated interplay between language comprehension and the non-linguistic visual context) with a variable ('ProCom') that captures characteristics of the language user and with a first approximation of the comprehender's speaker representation. Extending the CIA to the sCIA (social Coordinated Interplay Account) is the first step toward a real-time language comprehension account which might eventually accommodate the socially situated communicative interplay between comprehenders and speakers.

Keywords: Coordinated Interplay Account; comprehender; psycholinguistics; real-time language processing; social context; sociolinguistics; speaker.

FIGURE 1

The social Coordinated Interplay Account. The sCIA presents a possible extension of the CIA (Knoeferle and Crocker, 2007; Knoeferle et al., 2014). ProCom can influence the interpretation (int) and (social-) context expectations (ant_s) that can influence sentence processing in real time. We exemplify the sCIA using the results by Van Berkum et al. (2008). Note that we are illustrating only the processing of the critical word wine in Every evening I drink some… and assume that the previous input has already been processed. In rendering the mental representation, we present the interpretation starting from the word drink. Note also that the sCIA only allows one word at a time to enter the processing cycle. _{C_V OICE} indicates that the comprehender hears a child’s voice. Timing of stimulus presentation has not been manipulated in Van Berkum et al. (2008), hence the Time slot in the account is not filled. Since no visual scene is present in Van Berkum et al. (2008), the scene representation in this example is empty.

FIGURE 2

The social Coordinated Interplay Account. We exemplify the sCIA using the results for the mismatching speaker face – sentence valence condition for younger adults by Carminati and Knoeferle (2013). The original sentences were in German, we are using the literal English translation here. Note that we are illustrating only the processing of the first word which gives away the mismatch in emotional valence between the speaker’s facial expression (negative) and the picture that the sentence is about (positive), i.e., children in I think that the children at the pool…. We assume that the previous input has already been processed. In this study, a visual scene is present and hence ‘scene’ is filled. Moreover, an overt response is required, hence the ‘[truth value]’ is set to ‘[false]’ for the mismatch detection.