Thomas Wasow - US grants

9309612 Clark Language use in everyday discourse is a joint activity. Speakers and their addressees coordinate closely with each other as speakers try to attend to, identify, understand, and take up what they say. This project is about one level of that process: how speakers formulate and present utterances for their addressees in real time. The problem is that time moves inexorably onward, and speakers often cannot formulate their utterances in the time available. This lads to disfluences (pauses, uh, self-corrections, repeats, restarts, etc.). It also leads to the ordering of phrases based on how heavy, or complex, they are. The goal is to develop a model of formulation and presentation that accounts for these phenomena. The project contains five series of studies. Series 1 will examine disfluences in a large corpus of spontaneous English conversation. One study will look at how speakers choose the ("thee") over the (thuh) to forecast problems in formulating noun phrases. Another will investigate the contrasting problems that marked by uh and um. A third will examine when and why speakers repeat words as in "and uh there's no point in.in doing that," and a fourth, when and why they stretch words. A fifth will compare monologues and dialogues for number and types of disfluencies. Series 2 will use experiments to examine the disfluencies speakers produce in difficult situations. One experiment will examine the pattern of disfluences that arises as speakers formulate complicated descriptions. A second and third experiment will investigate the temporal details of how speakers manage interruptions caused either by side-tracking or by bursts of noise. A fourth will compare speakers strategies in presenting utterances in face-to-face and telephone conversations. Series 3 will investigate the logic that underlies spontaneous repairs of speech. Precisely how do repairs work when speakers replace one word or phrase with another? Several alternative models will be tested against a large corpus of repairs from spontaneous talk. One study will examine the function of self-talk--when speakers interrupt their utterances apparently to address themselves. Series 4 is based on the idea that many disfluences aren't a nuisance to listeners, as ordinarily assumed, but a help. One study will examine experimentally how addressees exploit the information present in speakers' uses of pauses, uh, um, and other disfluences. A second will examine listeners' interpretations of utterances that contain various disfluencies. Series 5 is about how speakers order phrases based on their weight or complexity. Speakers ordinarily prefer, for example, "I looked up the man I had known for a long time" over I looked the man I had known for a long time up," placing the underlined heavy noun phrase late in the sentence. These studies will study spontaneous uses of many types of constructions for the syntactic, informational, and intonational factors that make phrases heavy. One study will investigate how weight is reflected in disfluencies. Series 6 will examine the process by which speakers select heavy vs. light phrases in real time. One experiment will investigate how speakers order phrases as they recall descriptions, and another, how they do so as they describe visual scenes. A final experiment will examine how quickly listeners follow instructions that contain heavy phrases in various orderings.

Linguistic communication is fundamentally a social activity, involving at least two people. A comprehensive theory of language must explain both what goes on in the minds of individual speakers and how those individuals attend to and coordinate with their interlocutors. Psycholinguists study the unconscious mental processes involved in speaking and understanding language; sociolinguists study how social factors like age, gender, class, ethnicity, and regional differences influence language use. These two types of investigators often study the same linguistic phenomena from their own perspective, but there have been few attempts to combine the perspectives.

A special session at the 2011 meeting of the annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing will focus on the role of processing in language variation and change. As part of the premier annual psycholinguistics conference in the United States, it will address the interaction of individual and social psychological factors in language use. Bringing together these two research communities will provide a foundation for richer and better grounded theories of language production and understanding. This will support applications to language technologies (such as machine translation and automatic summarization) and language pedagogy.