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The Speaker’s Perspective

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Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 42))

Abstract

In the same way that listeners must take into account a hypothetical speaker to achieve successful communication, it is argued that speakers must take into account their hypothetical listeners to get their message across. Because child speakers are not yet able to accommodate their listener’s communicative needs, they often prefer the use of a potentially ambiguous pronoun to a more explicit full noun phrase. Mature speakers, on the other hand, are usually able to avoid misunderstanding. They tend to block the use of pronouns when using a pronoun will result in a non-intended interpretation. Also, they only deviate from canonical word order when the listener has other cues than word order to arrive at the intended meaning of the sentence. This pattern of production of pronouns and word order in discourse is accounted for by the same Optimality Theoretic grammar that was shown in previous chapters to account for the observed pattern of comprehension of pronouns and word order at the sentence level.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Taken from the website http://www.apple.com/au/iphone/features/siri.html on March 11, 2012.

  2. 2.

    The Dutch narratives in this chapter can be found in the Asymmetries corpus in the narrative section of CHILDES (MacWhinney and Snow 1985, 1990).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Petra Hendriks

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  1. Petra Hendriks
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Hendriks, P. (2014). The Speaker’s Perspective. In: Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6901-4_4

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