Limits to Rational Production of Discourse Connectives
Frances Yung, Jana Jungbluth and Vera Demberg
Frontiers in Psychology, 12, pp. 1729, 2021
Abstract:
Rational accounts of language use such as the uniform information density hypothesis, which
asserts that speakers distribute information uniformly across their utterances, and the rational
speech act (RSA) model, which suggests that speakers optimize the formulation of their message
by reasoning about what the comprehender would understand, have been hypothesized to
account for a wide range of language use phenomena. We here specifically focus on the
production of discourse connectives. While there is some prior work indicating that discourse
connective production may be governed by RSA, that work uses a strongly gamified experimental
setting. In this study, we aim to explore whether speakers reason about the interpretation of
their conversational partner also in more realistic settings. We thereby systematically vary the
task setup to tease apart effects of task instructions and effects of the speaker explicitly seeing the interpretation alternatives for the listener. Our results show that the RSA-predicted effect of connective choice based on reasoning about the listener is only found in the original setting
where explicit interpretation alternatives of the listener are available for the speaker. The effect
disappears when the speaker has to reason about listener interpretations. We furthermore find
that rational effects are amplified by the gamified task setting, indicating that meta-reasoning
about the specific task may play an important role and potentially limit the generalizability of the
found effects to more naturalistic every-day language use.