Publications

Sikos, Les; Venhuizen, Noortje; Drenhaus, Heiner; Crocker, Matthew W.

Speak before you listen: Pragmatic reasoning in multi-trial language games Inproceedings

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43, 2021.

Rational Speech Act theory (Frank & Goodman, 2012) has been successfully applied in numerous communicative settings, including studies using one-shot web-based language games. Several follow-up studies of the latter, however, suggest that listeners may not behave as pragmatically as originally suggested in those tasks. We investigate whether, in such reference games, listeners’ pragmatic reasoning about an informative speaker is improved by greater exposure to the task, and/or prior experience with being a speaker in this task. While we find limited evidence that increased exposure results in more pragmatic responses, listeners do show increased pragmatic reasoning after playing the role of the speaker. Moreover, we find that only in the Speaker-first condition, participant’s tendency to be an informative speaker predicts their degree of pragmatic behavior as a listener. These findings demonstrate that, in these settings, experience as a speaker enhances the ability of listeners to reason pragmatically, as modeled by RSA.

 

@inproceedings{sikos2021speak,
title = {Speak before you listen: Pragmatic reasoning in multi-trial language games},
author = {Les Sikos and Noortje Venhuizen and Heiner Drenhaus and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xc7f7wc},
year = {2021},
date = {2021},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
abstract = {Rational Speech Act theory (Frank & Goodman, 2012) has been successfully applied in numerous communicative settings, including studies using one-shot web-based language games. Several follow-up studies of the latter, however, suggest that listeners may not behave as pragmatically as originally suggested in those tasks. We investigate whether, in such reference games, listeners’ pragmatic reasoning about an informative speaker is improved by greater exposure to the task, and/or prior experience with being a speaker in this task. While we find limited evidence that increased exposure results in more pragmatic responses, listeners do show increased pragmatic reasoning after playing the role of the speaker. Moreover, we find that only in the Speaker-first condition, participant’s tendency to be an informative speaker predicts their degree of pragmatic behavior as a listener. These findings demonstrate that, in these settings, experience as a speaker enhances the ability of listeners to reason pragmatically, as modeled by RSA.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   C3

Sikos, Les; Staudte, Maria

A rose by any other verb: The effect of expectations and word category on processing effort in situated sentence comprehension Journal Article

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021.

Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a (more or less) expected critical word (Ankener et al., 2018; Tourtouri et al., 2019; Staudte et al., 2020). According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word (e.g., a verb or an adjective), which then reduces processing effort on the critical word (e.g., a referential noun). Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the reduction of uncertainty (i.e., the generation of expectations) simply does not modulate processing effort — or whether the particular subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure used in these studies (which emphasizes the referential nature of the noun as direct pointer to visually co-present objects) accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment~1 (a Visual World Paradigm study) and Experiment~2 (a Grammaticality Maze study) both replicate the effect found in Ankener et al. (2018) of visually-situated context on the word which uniquely identifies the referent, albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word — whether it be a noun or a verb — reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations.

@article{Sikos2021b,
title = {A rose by any other verb: The effect of expectations and word category on processing effort in situated sentence comprehension},
author = {Les Sikos and Maria Staudte},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661898/full},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661898},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-05-28},
journal = {Frontiers in Psychology},
abstract = {Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a (more or less) expected critical word (Ankener et al., 2018; Tourtouri et al., 2019; Staudte et al., 2020). According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word (e.g., a verb or an adjective), which then reduces processing effort on the critical word (e.g., a referential noun). Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate whether the reduction of uncertainty (i.e., the generation of expectations) simply does not modulate processing effort --- or whether the particular subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure used in these studies (which emphasizes the referential nature of the noun as direct pointer to visually co-present objects) accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment~1 (a Visual World Paradigm study) and Experiment~2 (a Grammaticality Maze study) both replicate the effect found in Ankener et al. (2018) of visually-situated context on the word which uniquely identifies the referent, albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word --- whether it be a noun or a verb --- reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   C3

Sikos, Les; Venhuizen, Noortje; Drenhaus, Heiner; Crocker, Matthew W.

Reevaluating pragmatic reasoning in language games Journal Article

PLOS ONE, 2021.

The results of a highly influential study that tested the predictions of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model suggest that (a) listeners use pragmatic reasoning in one-shot web-based referential communication games despite the artificial, highly constrained, and minimally interactive nature of the task, and (b) that RSA accurately captures this behavior. In this work, we reevaluate the contribution of the pragmatic reasoning formalized by RSA in explaining listener behavior by comparing RSA to a baseline literal listener model that is only driven by literal word meaning and the prior probability of referring to an object. Across three experiments we observe only modest evidence of pragmatic behavior in one-shot web-based language games, and only under very limited circumstances. We find that although RSA provides a strong fit to listener responses, it does not perform better than the baseline literal listener model. Our results suggest that while participants playing the role of the Speaker are informative in these one-shot web-based reference games, participants playing the role of the Listener only rarely take this Speaker behavior into account to reason about the intended referent. In addition, we show that RSA’s fit is primarily due to a combination of non-pragmatic factors, perhaps the most surprising of which is that in the majority of conditions that are amenable to pragmatic reasoning, RSA (accurately) predicts that listeners will behave non-pragmatically. This leads us to conclude that RSA’s strong overall correlation with human behavior in one-shot web-based language games does not reflect listener’s pragmatic reasoning about informative speakers.

@article{Sikos2021,
title = {Reevaluating pragmatic reasoning in language games},
author = {Les Sikos and Noortje Venhuizen and Heiner Drenhaus and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248388},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248388},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-03-17},
journal = {PLOS ONE},
abstract = {The results of a highly influential study that tested the predictions of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model suggest that (a) listeners use pragmatic reasoning in one-shot web-based referential communication games despite the artificial, highly constrained, and minimally interactive nature of the task, and (b) that RSA accurately captures this behavior. In this work, we reevaluate the contribution of the pragmatic reasoning formalized by RSA in explaining listener behavior by comparing RSA to a baseline literal listener model that is only driven by literal word meaning and the prior probability of referring to an object. Across three experiments we observe only modest evidence of pragmatic behavior in one-shot web-based language games, and only under very limited circumstances. We find that although RSA provides a strong fit to listener responses, it does not perform better than the baseline literal listener model. Our results suggest that while participants playing the role of the Speaker are informative in these one-shot web-based reference games, participants playing the role of the Listener only rarely take this Speaker behavior into account to reason about the intended referent. In addition, we show that RSA’s fit is primarily due to a combination of non-pragmatic factors, perhaps the most surprising of which is that in the majority of conditions that are amenable to pragmatic reasoning, RSA (accurately) predicts that listeners will behave non-pragmatically. This leads us to conclude that RSA’s strong overall correlation with human behavior in one-shot web-based language games does not reflect listener’s pragmatic reasoning about informative speakers.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Project:   C3

Tourtouri, Elli; Delogu, Francesca; Sikos, Les; Crocker, Matthew W.

Rational over-specification in visually-situated comprehension and production Journal Article

Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 3, pp. 175-202, 2019.

Contrary to the Gricean maxims of quantity (Grice, in: Cole, Morgan (eds) Syntax and semantics: speech acts, vol III, pp 41-58, Academic Press, New York, 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over-specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is also unclear whether referential redundancy hinders or facilitates comprehension.

We present an information-theoretic explanation for the use of over-specification in visually-situated communication, which quantifies the amount of uncertainty regarding the referent as entropy (Shannon in Bell Syst Tech J 5:10, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x, 1948). Examining both the comprehension and production of over-specifications, we present evidence that (a) listeners’ processing is facilitated by the use of redundancy as well as by a greater reduction of uncertainty early on in the utterance, and (b) that at least for some speakers, listeners’ processing concerns influence their encoding of over-specifications: Speakers were more likely to use redundant adjectives when these adjectives reduced entropy to a higher degree than adjectives necessary for target identification.

@article{Tourtouri2019,
title = {Rational over-specification in visually-situated comprehension and production},
author = {Elli Tourtouri and Francesca Delogu and Les Sikos and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs41809-019-00032-6},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-019-00032-6},
year = {2019},
date = {2019},
journal = {Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science},
pages = {175-202},
volume = {3},
number = {2},
abstract = {Contrary to the Gricean maxims of quantity (Grice, in: Cole, Morgan (eds) Syntax and semantics: speech acts, vol III, pp 41-58, Academic Press, New York, 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over-specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is also unclear whether referential redundancy hinders or facilitates comprehension. We present an information-theoretic explanation for the use of over-specification in visually-situated communication, which quantifies the amount of uncertainty regarding the referent as entropy (Shannon in Bell Syst Tech J 5:10, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x, 1948). Examining both the comprehension and production of over-specifications, we present evidence that (a) listeners’ processing is facilitated by the use of redundancy as well as by a greater reduction of uncertainty early on in the utterance, and (b) that at least for some speakers, listeners’ processing concerns influence their encoding of over-specifications: Speakers were more likely to use redundant adjectives when these adjectives reduced entropy to a higher degree than adjectives necessary for target identification.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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Projects:   A1 C3

Tourtouri, Elli; Sikos, Les; Crocker, Matthew W.

Referential Entropy influences Overspecification: Evidence from Production Miscellaneous

31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, UC Davis, Davis CA, USA, 2018.

Specificity in referential communication

  • Grice’s Maxim of Quantity [1]: Speakers should produce only informa9on that is strictly necessary for identifying the target
  • However, it is possible to establish reference with either minimally-specified (MS; precise) or over-specified (OS; redundant) expressions
  • Moreover, speakers overspecify frequently and systematically [e.g., 2-6]

Q: Why do people overspecificy?

 

@miscellaneous{Tourtourietal2018a,
title = {Referential Entropy influences Overspecification: Evidence from Production},
author = {Elli Tourtouri and Les Sikos and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323809271_Referential_entropy_influences_overspecification_Evidence_from_production},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference},
publisher = {UC Davis},
address = {Davis CA, USA},
abstract = {Specificity in referential communication

  • Grice’s Maxim of Quantity [1]: Speakers should produce only informa9on that is strictly necessary for identifying the target
  • However, it is possible to establish reference with either minimally-specified (MS; precise) or over-specified (OS; redundant) expressions
  • Moreover, speakers overspecify frequently and systematically [e.g., 2-6]
Q: Why do people overspecificy?},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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Project:   C3

Tourtouri, Elli; Sikos, Les; Crocker, Matthew W.

Referential entropy influences the production of overspecifications Miscellaneous

10th Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science, Communication, Pragmatics, and Theory of Mind (DuCog), University of Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2018.

@miscellaneous{Tourtourietal2018b,
title = {Referential entropy influences the production of overspecifications},
author = {Elli Tourtouri and Les Sikos and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.mpi.nl/publications/item3310165/referential-entropy-influences-production-overspecifications},
year = {2018},
date = {2018},
booktitle = {10th Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science, Communication, Pragmatics, and Theory of Mind (DuCog)},
publisher = {University of Zagreb},
address = {Dubrovnik, Croatia},
pubstate = {published},
type = {miscellaneous}
}

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Project:   C3

Sikos, Les; Greenberg, Clayton; Drenhaus, Heiner; Crocker, Matthew W.

Information density of encodings: The role of syntactic variation in comprehension Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society(CogSci 2017), pp. 3168-3173, Austin, Texas, USA, 2017.

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis links production strategies with comprehension processes, predicting that speakers will utilize flexibility in encoding in order to increase uniformity in the rate of information transmission, as measured by surprisal (Jaeger, 2010). Evidence in support of UID comes primarily from studies focusing on word-level effects, e.g. demonstrating that surprisal predicts the omission/inclusion of optional words. Here we investigate whether comprehenders are sensitive to the information density of alternative encodings that are more syntactically complex. We manipulated the syntactic encoding of complex noun phrases in German via meaning-preserving pre-nominal and post-nominal modification in contexts that were either predictive or non-predictive. We then used the G-maze reading task to measure online comprehension during self-paced reading. The results are consistent with the UID hypothesis. Length-adjusted reading times were facilitated for pre-nominally modified head nouns, and this effect was larger in non-predictive contexts.

@inproceedings{Sikos2017,
title = {Information density of encodings: The role of syntactic variation in comprehension},
author = {Les Sikos and Clayton Greenberg and Heiner Drenhaus and Matthew W. Crocker},
url = {https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Information-density-of-encodings%3A-The-role-of-in-Sikos-Greenberg/06a47324b53bc53e0e4762fd1547091d8b2392f1},
year = {2017},
date = {2017},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society(CogSci 2017)},
pages = {3168-3173},
address = {Austin, Texas, USA},
abstract = {The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis links production strategies with comprehension processes, predicting that speakers will utilize flexibility in encoding in order to increase uniformity in the rate of information transmission, as measured by surprisal (Jaeger, 2010). Evidence in support of UID comes primarily from studies focusing on word-level effects, e.g. demonstrating that surprisal predicts the omission/inclusion of optional words. Here we investigate whether comprehenders are sensitive to the information density of alternative encodings that are more syntactically complex. We manipulated the syntactic encoding of complex noun phrases in German via meaning-preserving pre-nominal and post-nominal modification in contexts that were either predictive or non-predictive. We then used the G-maze reading task to measure online comprehension during self-paced reading. The results are consistent with the UID hypothesis. Length-adjusted reading times were facilitated for pre-nominally modified head nouns, and this effect was larger in non-predictive contexts.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Project:   C3

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