NWO Veni project "Try to see it my way: When do speakers consider the listener's perspective?"
- University of Groningen - 2017-present
Project code: 275-89-036 - Publications:
- Vogels, J. (2019). Both thematic role and next-mention biases affect pronoun use in Dutch. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3029-3035). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Full text
In this project, I aim to provide a more complete explanation for why speakers appear to adapt their language use to their addressee's needs in some cases, but not in others. Using language production experiments combined with eye-tracking techniques, I investigate when speakers' choices of how to refer to something include a consideration of the listener's perspective. My first results suggest that speakers may only adapt to their listener when there are strong enough cues that adaptation is really necessary. More experiments across different communicative contexts will further explore which kind of cues trigger perspective taking in reference.