Dr. Victor Ferreira

What speakers do and don't do to successfully communicate

Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 1:30 pm -3:30 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building, 1200 av des Pins ouest

Dr. Victor Ferreira is an Associate Professor of Psychology at UC, San Diego and Associate Director of the Center for Research in Language.

Abstract

Accumulating evidence in the cognitive and linguistic sciences suggests that people are often near-optimal actors, being exquisitely tuned to the world around them. Against this, I describe a range of observations revealing that when producing language, speakers are notably suboptimal and insensitive to many important features of their linguistic expressions and communicative environments. For example, speakers produce words based on factors other than what they mean; they sometimes choose descriptions that ignore what their addressees do and do not know and that violate their own communicative goals; and they are largely insensitive to the linguistic ambiguity of their utterances. Instead, speakers are sensitive to their own cognitive needs: They choose words and sentence structures that are readily accessible, and choose descriptions referring to features that draw their attention or that straightforwardly repeat previous descriptions. I argue that speakers' productions show sensitivity to their own needs like this because producing language is hard -- especially, it's harder than understanding language. As such, it is not speakers that are optimally tuned to their environment, but speakers and hearers together, each making up for the challenges of the other, exhbiting a division of labor for communicative success.