title: Speaker-external versus speaker-internal forces on utterance form: do cognitive demands override threats to referential success?
abstract: To what extent do speaker-external communicative pressures versus speaker-internal cognitive pressures affect utterance form? Four experiments measured speakers' references to privately known (i.e., privileged) objects when naming mutually known (i.e., common ground) objects. Although speaker-external communicative pressures demanded that speakers avoid references to privileged objects, 2 experiments showed that speakers often ignored this demand when it coexisted with a speaker-internal pressure to attend to those privileged objects. The authors hypothesize that this was due to increased salience of privileged objects (a speaker-internal pressure). Experiment 3 showed that directly boosting the salience of privileged objects increased the likelihood that speakers will inappropriately refer to those objects. Experiment 4 showed that the salience-sensitive mechanism in Experiments 1 and 2 is likely related to the mechanism causing such references in Experiment 3. Thus, the language production system is especially sensitive to cognitive pressures even when communicative harm results.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA.
authors.forename: Liane Wardlow
authors.initials: LW
authors.lastname: Lane
authors.forename: Victor S
authors.initials: VS
authors.lastname: Ferreira
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003142:Communication; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007389:Internal-External Control; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011340:Problem Solving; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D012858:Size Perception; D012931:Social Environment; D014705:Verbal Behavior