Speaker and listener effects on the processing of pragmatic meaning
| Author(s) | Fairchild, Sarah C. | |
| Date Accessioned | 2018-11-15T14:11:10Z | |
| Date Available | 2018-11-15T14:11:10Z | |
| Publication Date | 2018 | |
| SWORD Update | 2018-09-11T13:26:39Z | |
| Abstract | Successful communication requires a listener to reason about a speaker’s intended meaning – the pragmatic level of meaning – in addition to the semantic meaning of the utterance. Pragmatic competence is an important communicative skill, yet it is also one which varies widely across contexts and individuals. What a listener interprets a speaker’s utterance to mean is informed by knowledge of that speaker’s abilities and preferences, as well as the surrounding context. Furthermore, it is well-documented that even adult listeners vary in the ease with which they make pragmatic inferences. While prior research has investigated the effects of linguistic context on pragmatic inference, it is not yet fully understood how variation in speaker and listener identities affect pragmatic processing. Investigating the effects of such variation is important to our understanding of human communication, which is not complete until we can account for the ways in which diverse speakers and listeners may intend and interpret meaning differently. This issue is particularly relevant given the growing number of opportunities to converse with individuals of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Accordingly, this dissertation explores variation in pragmatic inference from both speaker and listener perspectives. In Chapters 2 and 3, we investigate how pragmatic inference and later behavior is influenced by a speaker’s linguistic abilities by manipulating (non-)native speaker identity. In Chapter 4, we investigate the relationship between an individual listener’s pragmatic competence and their executive function and theory of mind abilities. The findings of this dissertation enrich our understanding of communication by demonstrating systematic differences in pragmatic inference that are dependent on characteristics of both the speaker and the listener. | en_US |
| Advisor | Papafragou, Anna | |
| Degree | Ph.D. | |
| Department | University of Delaware, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences | |
| Unique Identifier | 1065537605 | |
| URL | http://udspace.udel.edu/handle/19716/23906 | |
| Language | en | |
| Publisher | University of Delaware | en_US |
| URI | https://search.proquest.com/docview/2117257586?accountid=10457 | |
| Keywords | Language, literature and linguistics | en_US |
| Keywords | Psychology | en_US |
| Keywords | Executive function | en_US |
| Keywords | Informativeness | en_US |
| Keywords | Non-native speech | en_US |
| Keywords | Pragmatics | en_US |
| Keywords | Scalar implicature | en_US |
| Keywords | Theory of mind | en_US |
| Title | Speaker and listener effects on the processing of pragmatic meaning | en_US |
| Type | Thesis | en_US |