Language and Communication Notes

Introduction to Language and Communication

Overview by Professor Heather Ferguson

• Professor Heather Ferguson specializes in social interaction and communication within cognitive psychology.
• Her research examines conversations and social interactions across different age groups (adolescents to older adults) and conditions (e.g., autism spectrum conditions).

Structure of the Lecture

• Key Topics:
  • Semantics vs. Pragmatics: Definitions and Contextual Differences
  • Interactive Alignment in Conversations
  • Linguistic Theory: Presupposition and Conversational Implicatures
  • Cooperation Principle in Communication
  • Social Motivation and In-Group Effects
  • Linguistic Features: Counterfactual Language and Figurative Language
• Lecture slides available on Moodle with references and study notes for deeper content exploration.
• Supplementary materials include chapter overviews and summary articles on Moodle.

Semantics vs. Pragmatics

Semantics

• Definition: Conceptual meaning of words, akin to dictionary definitions.
• Focuses on word relationships within a conceptual domain and grammatical usage.
• Example:
  • Word: "Coffee"
  • Conceptual meaning: A dark-colored, warm beverage made from beans, often consumed in the morning or at social gatherings.
  • Semantic meaning: Grammatical usage such as requiring a determiner ("the coffee") and frequent associations with words like "cake" or "breakfast."

Pragmatics

• Definition: How language meaning varies with context, individuals, or speakers.
• Emphasizes the interactive nature of communication, with language evolving through social exchange.
• Contextual influences:
  • Speaker and audience identity
  • Presence of overhearers
  • Shared information levels
  • Intentions (deception, humor)
• Example:
  • "Coffee" can denote skin color or voice quality metaphorically or serve as a euphemism for sex in comedy.

Pragmatic Usage

• Essential to understanding non-literal meanings in everyday language.
• Includes interpreting homonyms (e.g. "bank"), sarcasm, and implied meanings.

Dynamic Nature of Context and Meaning

• Meaning shifts with different contextual cues, altering the interpretation of language significantly.
• Context Sources:
  • Linguistic context: Surrounding words providing disambiguation (e.g., "savings" linked to "bank").
  • Physical context: Environment influencing the meaning (e.g., "bank" on a building implies a financial institution).
  • Social context: Speaker and comprehender characteristics impacting intended and understood meaning.

Social Context and Communication

• Key Factors:
  • Speaker/listener characteristics
  • Conversation purpose
  • Setting of interaction
  • Shared knowledge among participants

Context in Shaping Language Comprehension

• Sarcasm Example:
  • Subtle cues like facial expressions (smiles, raised eyebrows), voice pitch changes, and relaxed posture indicate sarcasm.
• Trustworthiness:
  • Influenced by speaker characteristics (e.g., non-native accents may reduce perceived truthfulness).
• Integration of cues enhances understanding, demonstrated by difficulties in noisy environments when gestures or facial expressions are restricted.

Experimental Work in Cognitive Neuroscience

• Studies by Joss van Berkum and colleagues utilize the N400 effect measured by ERPs to study semantic anomalies.
• The N400 effect is a negative brain wave peaking around 400ms after encountering unexpected words or phrases.

Studies and Anomalies

• Sentence Level Anomalies:
  • "The peanut was in love" vs. "The peanut was salty" elicits the N400 effect.
• Contextual Anomalies:
  • Statements incongruent with established contexts also trigger the N400 effect.

Impact of Context

• Appropriate context can reverse the N400 effect, as demonstrated by changing perceptions of a peanut in a narrative.
• Speaker characteristics also influence language understanding:
  • Male/female voices, upper/lower class accents, and age affect anomaly detection.
• Implicit, automatic processing involved in understanding context.

Speaker Errors and Listener Reactions

• Monolingual speakers listening to native vs. foreign-accented speakers produce different ERP responses when errors are made.
• Grammatical errors by native speakers elicit a strong NREF effect, while similar errors by foreign speakers do not.
• Semantic anomalies trigger N400 responses regardless of speaker accent.

Interactive Alignment

Pragmatics

• Involves implied meanings requiring shared understanding.
• Shared understanding is vital for avoiding miscommunication.
• Example:
  • Mary: "I thought she really liked your book."
  • Alex: "Yeah, you thought she did."
  • Implication: Neither Mary nor Alex believe the person liked the book.

Language and Interactive Alignment

• Based on criticisms of language theories assuming language isolation.
• Humans designed for dialogues rather than monologues and are interactive.

Interactive Alignment Model by Martin Pickering and Simon Garrod

• Emphasizes the dynamic interactive element in understanding language.
• Each person brings their own situation model, representing immediate context and shared history.
• Conversation aligns situation models, influencing language use.
• Alignment cascades through various levels (word choice, intonation, grammatical structure) and is replicated.

Key Assumptions of Interactive Alignment Model

• Alignment occurs automatically without explicit discussion.
• Listeners and speakers are equally crucial for ensuring understanding.
• Interaction and alignment cascade across different levels, influencing the entire situation model.
• Mental state inferences occur spontaneously without direct effort.

Prediction in Understanding

• Crucial for both producing and comprehending language in dialogues.
• Speaking requires thinking ahead to plan and adapt.
• Listening involves predicting what the speaker will say.
• Involves social cognitive ability and theory of mind mental states ability.

Efficiency

• Interactive alignment explains efficient language production and comprehension in dialogues and how meaning can be understood very easily.

Maze Game Studies

• Participants work together to navigate a maze, requiring aligned understanding of each other's locations.
• Pairs quickly align on unambiguous conversation and description schemes.
• Schemes develop without explicit discussion, evolving from lengthy descriptions to shorter references.
• After two games, 95% of conversation partners use the exact scheme.

Coordination and Alignment of Language

• Levels of representation influencing alignment:
  • Language choices based on what the other person has said.
    • Gestures and posture
  • Phonology
  • Figurative language
    • Syntax
• Interactive alignment is specific to the individual, and users are sensitive to shared mutual understanding and can adapt language based on who we speak to.

Conceptual Pacts

• Researchers tasked participants with conversation about objects, and found that breaking a conceptual pact can disrupt relationships and communication breakdowns.
• Breaking the Pact:
  • No trouble to accept that that person isn't in your conceptual pact about how to refer to that object.

Impact of Social Context

• The mere presence of a third person influences word choice and fluency.
• Awareness of the listener context influences more words to help the listener understand what they are referencing.

Influence of Physical Environment

• Physical context can provide cues to understand and distinguish information.
• Studies involving different colored backgrounds influenced continued object modifiers usage.

Consequences of Interactive Alignment

Changes that the extent to which another person aligns with you changes

• How the participants used the lexical alignment and used the same words as that human was experimented with

• When a human aligned with that person, they found them to be less annoying, and they found them as more likable when the human interacted, but when it was a computer, it made no difference in these sort of social ratings of that other person or human.

Neural Basis of Alignment

• When two people have a conversation, their brain activity aligns.
• Neural synchrony during conversations measured via EEG, fMRI, and FNERS to measure and reflect temporal, spatial, and live interactive elements.
• Techniques:
  • EEG is looking at the electrical brain activity for temporal aspects
    • Problem: Interrupts signal when people are moving
  • fMRI: great for spatial locations of brain activity in a tube, not live interactive in the way that these interactive alignment models suggest.
    • Limitation: Limited to movement
  • FNERS so Functional Near Infrared Spectrometry Spectroscopy using infrared light to shine in good for temporal and spatial information.
    • Great thing is that it is not in a tube, you can move around
• Individuals producing language vs having a conversation
  • What we can see is we can use any of these methods to record brain activity where it is, active and the time course is when, how quickly what's eliciting those.
  • Parts of the brain that light up, and activity there is. Is an overlap but not time locked to each other.

Important Elements

• Higher synchrony has been linked to communication and mutual understanding and supports joint attention and empathy

Presupposition and Conversational Implicatures

Defnitions

Presupposition

• Implied shared understanding of something already known or true
• Assuming something is already true
• Implicature meaning additional meaning depending on the context

Conversational Implicatures

• Inferences made on top of what is said
• Distinction between conversational and conventional inferences
• With implicatures, they can be cancellable, so that language is adaptable through a conversation.

The Cooperative Principle

• communicates meaning in conversation. Rulebook people communicate
• Conveying meaning
• Systematically convey
• Doesn't lose meaning
• Efficient communication

Systematic

• Breaking the rules, we can infer meaning, by doing this is useful
• Communication. Tacit agreement efficient
  • Goal of Conversation goal is successful!

Grices's Work

• Maxims of conversation- Inference people make to make convo easier
  • Quality
  • Quantity
  • Relevance
  • Manner

Maxim of Quality

• Only giving information when true, must have evident for

Maxim of Quantity

• Giving amount of information for any conversation

Maxim of Relevance

• Making answer relevant

Maxim of Manner

• Trying to be informative
• Don't confuse people purposefully
• These maxims are agreed frequent

Violation Meaning

• By violating a maxim you can derive meaning.

Social Motivation and Group Effects

Importance of motivation

• Desires, Intentions for success in communication, better ability success in interactions
  • Pro social willingness to help people to be cooperative
• Different motivations, more cooperative and helpful
  • Translate into more social success and conversations

Study and social influence

• Older people
  • Pro social intentions increase so cooperative behaviors are likely in communication

Social Emotional Selectivity Theory

• Focus on quality interactions
• Put less for social motivation

Selective Engagement Hypothesis

• Cognitive capabilities used support conversation needs for all ages, older people save cognitive skills for who for their interested in.
• Give reasons motivation practice communications

The Double Empathy Problem

• Need a detrimental communication
  • To align those shared settings communication much easier versus when not
    • Report success and rapport
• Test in Autism conditions so different neuro type, differences and brain functions
  • Mismatch is the cause of difficulty
  • The testing shows the neurotype whether match mixed pairings autistic vs non.

Traditional Thoeries Spectrum Condition

• Fundamental difficulty in social interaction in autism, social interaction paired autistic pairs, Non would be a better interaction, would be increased the non autistic group helping autistic group.

Empathy Theory

• Matched same neuroitype, communicate effectively with both autistic and non, difficult in communication mismatched pairs. Misunderstand each other

Conclusions from Testing

• Distinctive interaction styles and context is important.
• The transfusion diffusion of interaction.
  • Effective and more successful the chain passes information
  • Group tested autistic non, mixed group
    • Measuring the remembering chain

Remembered Details

• Reduced detail mixed, communication most successful neurotyope chain.

In Educational Settings

• Brain learning educational environments learning performance related electrical activity in the brain between teacher and students.
• Learning better tested tested immediately
• Learning significantly predicted synchronicity in pre and post test.
• Live, active environments have neural oscillation because someone cannot align in the video learning.
• Active Brain
  • Learning individual group much more effect because brain waves
  • Better tested group because better connected brain.

Conflict between Semantic and Pragmatics:

Contextual Conflict

• Counterfactuals and Figurative language

Counterfactuals language ( Hypo)

• Valid Reasoning but False