Language Use and Understanding

Language Use and Understanding BCS 261 LIN 241 PSY 261 CLASS 5: GIVEN AND NEW INFORMATION

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Given vs. New • Given = information that is known • New = information that is not known • … the ball. Give me the ball. • … the ball. Give me the bat.

What does it mean for something to be known? • Prince (1992) • DISCOURSE-GIVEN vs. HEARER-GIVEN • INFERRABLE • Here’s a house. The door is yellow. • Linguistically given • Visually given • Given recently, not so recently

Linguistic marking of Given/New • Determiners (the vs. a) • I’m going to adopt the / a dog. • Too • Elizabeth tells awful jokes too • Relative clauses • The jokes Horace tells are awful. • Clefts • It was me who ate the pie. • What I ate was the pie.

Anaphor = a linguistic term that corefers with something mentioned earlier • Antecedent = the given information that was mentioned earlier • This is my dog. He’s a labrador. • Give me the candle. The candle is the one on the left.

How does given/new affect language processing? • Production: • Speakers tend to place given information before new (e.g., Arnold et al., 2000) • Comprehension: • Listeners try to identify what given information the novel linguistic input relates to.

Haviland & Clark (1974) • The Given-New Strategy: The speaker’s purpose is to provide information to his audience, the listener’s goal is to extract the new information and integrate it with old information already in memory.

Predictions by Given-New Strategy 1. If the Given Information matches something in context, that is, if it has an Antecedent, the listener will be quick to respond that he understands the sentence. 2. If the Given Information does not have a matching Antecedent, the listener will be slower to claim he comprehends the sentence.

Experiment 1 • Direct Antecedent Pair e.g. We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm. • Indirect Antecedent Pair e.g. We checked the picnic supplies. The beer was warm. • Purpose: To test the predictions claimed by Given-New Strategy • Procedure: Pairs of context & target sentences are presented to subjects sequentially. The sentence pairs are grouped into 2 types: • Comprehension time of target sentence are measured • (“Press the red button as soon as you understand what • the second sentence means”)

Results: Direct condition faster than Indirect Direct Antecedent Pairs: 835 ms Indirect Antecedent Pairs: 1016 ms Why? Is it reference to given information? Or repeat of same noun phrase?

Experiment 2 • Purpose: To test if the results from exp. 1 are due to the repetition of a noun • Direct antecedent: We got some beer out of the trunk. The beer was warm. • “some beer” is the antecedent of “the beer” • Indirect antecedent: Andrew was especially fond of beer. The beer was warm. • “beer” is NOT the antecedent of “the beer”

Results • Comprehension time: • Direct Antecedent Pairs: 1031ms • Indirect Antecedent Pairs: 1168ms • Subjects responded on an average 137ms faster towards the direct antecedent. • Repetition of the critical noun is not enough to account for the comprehension time difference.

Experiment 3 • Purpose: To investigate the model with various types of presupposition & what effect of negation has on the process • Presupposition: used adverbs e.g. still, either, again, too • Negative Antecedent: Given information is expressed in negation in the context sentence. (subjects had to deduce the meaning and therefore required a longer comprehension time)

Experiment 3 DA: Last Christmas Eugene became absolutely smashed. IA Last Christmas Eugene went to a lot of parties. NA: Last Christmas Eugene couldn’t stay sober. … This Christmas he got very drunk again. Additional manipulation for DA pairs: lexical repetition no lexical repetition

Predictions • Comprehension times for DA should be shortest among the 3 pairs, since both IA and NA require an extra inference. No direct relationship between IA and NA.

Results • Comprehension time: • DA = fastest for all 4 adverbs • IA, NA = roughly equal for all the adverbs except ‘either’ (where IA was slower) • No difference between DA pairs with surface repetition and without

Conclusion • Sentences are comprehended w.r.t. the context and past knowledge • Given-New Strategy -- listeners syntactically break sentences into Given & New information, and then attempt to add New information to memory using the Given information as a pointer to some Antecedent already in memory. • If no Antecedent is present, listeners must build some sort of bridging structure, treat all information as new and begin construction or a new structure, or attempt to recompute what is Given and what is New in the sentence.

Issues • “Given” is not always defined syntactically • The dog I’m going to buy • Or is defined late in the utterance • Last Christmas Eugene became smashed. • This Christmas he got drunk again. • This Christmas he got drunk instead. • How is information defined as given or new?

Discussion Questions • Is given information more readily available in working memory stores? . . . There is no need to search memory stores because it seems that all relevant information is readily available (Elizabeth Riina) • On p 518 the researchers posit that the subject will treat the first sentence as new info, and set up a memory structure for it which he can then use to process the second sentence. Are the sentences/concepts/vocabulary simply being stored in short term memory? This would suffice for the duration of the experiment, but if that is true than what types of memories/knowledge is being accessed as the antecedent for the given information? (Heather McLendon)

When I transcribed the conversation with my friends I noticed there was a lot of word repetitions when we spoke. Is this repetition of words the redundant information that becomes the prerequisite for understanding and communication, or do the speech repetitions in common conversations serve another purpose? (Maryrita Maier)

They stated in the "discussion" section of the paper that the subject will take the first sentence in the pair as new information and then take the second sentence in the pair and find an antecendent for it. Does this mean that the subject needs two antecendents; one for the first sentence and one for the second sentence? (Jessee Blake)

Would an experiment testing this strategy using spoken language carry the same results? (Anthony Shook) • As I read the examples of sentence pairings I was struck foremost by how artificial they sounded . . . I wonder how applicable the results of the study are to more natural language patterns. I also wonder if any of the delayed response times could be due simply to the awkward construction (Heather McLendon)

They made the assumption that the subjects were comprehending the sentences with respect to the contect because of how they structured their experiment. However, is there a way that they could have directly tested for that so that they would not have needed to make that assumption? (Jessee Blake) • How was the content of the sentences controlled? (Elizabeth Riina) • Do you think the reaction time for direct antecedents would change significantly if the sentences dealt with content the students were already familiar with, ie: a particular class they are in or a schoolwide event? (Jessica DeSisto)

What about when the listener is not reminded of the Given information directly preceding a piece of New information, but that New information is still relevant to something the listener already knows? Would that be considered an inference? Why? (Nicole Dobrowolski) • Is the Given information referred by Haviland and Clark the same as prior knowledge? (Maryrita Maier)

How would the Given-New strategy work if the New information were believed to be false? (Nicole Dobrowolski)

Language Use and Understanding