title: Adjustment of speaker's referential expressions to an addressee's likely knowledge and link with theory of mind abilities.
abstract: To communicate cooperatively, speakers must determine what constitutes the common ground with their addressee and adapt their referential choices accordingly. Assessing another person's knowledge requires a social cognition ability termed theory of mind (ToM). This study relies on a novel referential communication task requiring probabilistic inferences of the knowledge already held by an addressee prior to the study. Forty participants were asked to present 10 movie characters and the addressee, who had the same characters in a random order, was asked to place them in order. ToM and other aspects of social cognition were also assessed. Participants used more information when presenting likely unknown than likely known movie characters. They particularly increased their use of physical descriptors, which most often accompanied movie-related information. Interestingly, a significant relationship emerged between our ToM test and the increased amount of information given for the likely unknown characters. These results suggest that speakers use ToM to infer their addressee's likely knowledge and accordingly adapt their referential expressions.
authors.affiliation: Département de Psychiatrie et de Neurosciences, Université Laval, Québec, QC Canada ; Centre de Recherche de l'Institut Universitaire en Santé Mentale de Québec, Québec, QC Canada.
authors.forename: Amélie M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Achim
authors.affiliation: Institut des Sciences du Langage et de la Communication, Université de Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel Switzerland.
authors.forename: Marion
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fossard
authors.affiliation: Centre de Recherche de l'Institut Universitaire en Santé Mentale de Québec, Québec, QC Canada ; École de Psychologie, Université Laval, Québec, QC Canada.
authors.forename: Sophie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Couture
authors.affiliation: Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC Canada.
authors.forename: André
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Achim
keywords: collaboration; common ground; egocentric bias; interactive task; mentalizing; reference; theory of mind