Priming and Conceptual Pacts in Overhearers' Adoption of Referring Expressions

Priming and Conceptual Pacts in Overhearers’ Adoption of Referring Expressions Abstract Current theories of communication yield predictions about the expression choice of overhearers as well as primary discourse participants. We discuss three such theories and evaluate them with reference to new data on object naming elicited through a confederate priming paradigm. Our results show that participants adopt primed referring expressions if they are highly involved in the task, but mere exposure to the object labels yields very limited priming effects. Also, common ground is a relatively marginal factor in expression choice here. We interpret these results as supportive of the importance of grounding and challenging for interactive alignment-based accounts of expression choice. Introduction Inter-personal communication is customarily taken to involve processes of cooperation and coordination between interlocutors at a number of levels. At the level of the conversational turn, speakers cooperate with hearers by making their contribution appropriate to the current purpose of the talk exchange, as observed by Grice (1975). They also coordinate with hearers by making their intentions understood (Grice 1957). At a discourse level, speaker and hearer work together to achieve conversational goals, which might involve the sharing of information, the making and satisfying of requests, the formation of joint plans, etc. (Clark 1996). A diverse range of theories have been proposed to account for how speakers and listeners successfully engage in this process of communication, with particular reference to dyadic interactions such as dialogues. An influential account of dialogue, the interactive-alignment model (Pickering & Garrod 2004), places low-level processes of priming at the heart of communication. In this account, interlocutors align their representations as a result of dialogue. This alignment commences at a surface level, in that the dialogue participants converge at a lexical and syntactic level, due to the priming effects exerted by the use of particular words and syntactic forms. The resulting alignment then percolates up through the system, eventually reaching the level of situation models. The goal of communication, on this account, is to accomplish the alignment of situation models. However, the fundamental drivers of this are low-level, automatic and unconscious processes, specifically priming processes. Consequently, this account posits little involvement of strategic factors in the success of dyadic communication. A contrary viewpoint is that interlocutors are highly aware of each other’s mental states and that this awareness informs their behaviour. Clark and Schaefer (1989) argue that successful contributions to a discourse requires grounding; that is, speaker and hearer must mutually believe that the speaker’s meaning has been understood. The notion of common ground (CG) – the shared knowledge, beliefs and assumptions of the interlocutors (Clark & Marshall 1981) – thus becomes relevant here. The goal of the interaction involves building and updating CG, and doing this requires consideration of the existing CG state. A simple example is the use of a referring expression: if a speaker predicates a new property of an entity (e.g. “John is away”), this can only be successful as a discourse contribution if the hearer correctly identifies the entity. This requires the speaker to take account of the hearer’s knowledge about how this entity is labelled. Such knowledge may be presumed on the basis of linguistic community membership, but it may also arise from previous referential success, or on the basis of the formation of “conceptual pacts” (Brennan & Clark 1996). Distinctively, conceptual pacts involve the establishment of partner-specific labels for entities, which can then be successfully used in interaction with that specific partner but are not preferred for general use with other interlocutors. An intermediate position between these two viewpoints is occupied by Keysar (2007). He argues that “when people communicate, they do not routinely take into account the mental states of others” (ibid., p.72). Instead, drawing upon evidence from Theory of Mind experiments, he argues for the primacy of egocentric processing, and contends that “one’s own perspective is dominant…the consideration of others’ beliefs is not automatic” (ibid., p.75). Unlike the interactive-alignment model, this approach entails conscious reasoning about the choice of referring expression, but unlike Clark and colleagues, Keysar considers CG to be a relatively peripheral issue, and the role of the hearer and his/her mental state to be a marginal factor in the speaker’s choice of expression. In support of this, Barr and Keysar (2002) provide experimental evidence that people (unconsciously) expect new conversational partners to adhere to conceptual pacts that have previously been established, even though the new partner is not privy to this pact. This in turn suggests that conceptual pacts are not triadic relations between two interlocutors and an entity, in which both agree to refer to this entity in a particular way within their interaction, but rather pairs of relations in which both parties separately agree to refer to this entity by a particular label. Experimental work on dialogue has been conducted from numerous theoretical perspectives, including those outlined above. However, relatively little attention has been paid in this literature to non-dyadic interactions, for instance those in which a third individual is present but not directly engaged in the conversation 1 . In this paper, we aim to extend findings about the choice of referring expression into the domain of non-dyadic interactions. There are several motivations for this move. First, the potential relevance of third parties in conversation has long been acknowledged (see Clark & Carlson 1982) but the implications of this for expression choice have attracted relatively little attention. Secondly, such A partial exception to this is Keysar and Henly (2002), but their primary focus is on using overhearers to evaluate the likely communicative success of utterances, rather than on examining the effect of dialogue on overhearers themselves.