Expressions référentielles et formes prosodiques : quand et comment la prise en compte de notre interlocuteur guide‑t‑elle nos choix linguistiques ?

Abstract

The process of accommodating or adapting to the needs and knowledge of our interlocutor in a conversation is called audience design (Clark & Murphy, 1982; Clark, 1996; Galati & Brennan, 2010). We also speak of perspective taking since interlocutors have to take into account the perspective of their interlocutor when they formulate their statements (Brown-Schmidt & Heller, 2018). To understand when and how the interlocutors use audience design means to understand how speakers take into account information that they believe they share with their interlocutor, in other words their common ground. Audience design implies the distinction between what is part of the common ground (ie, the information shared with a particular interlocutor and mutually recognized as such; Clark, 1996), and what is part of the private knowledge (ie, privileged ground) specific to each speaker and unknown to the interlocutor. The common ground includes contextual knowledge (on the current physical context or related to previous conversational exchanges) and encyclopedic knowledge (such as knowledge shared by a specific community, e.g., the residents of Aix-en-Provence) shared by the speaker and the listener and recognized by the two interlocutors to be known by each of them (Clark & Marshall, 1981). Thus, the information shared or not shared by the interlocutors at one point in the conversation would determine the type of expressions or utterances used by the speaker for his/her interlocutor. While it is clear that speakers and listeners adapt their linguistic behavior to their interlocutor in order to avoid and resolve situations of incomprehension, to what extent, and in which situation, audience design is involved is still a question under debate. In other words, when, and how, do we take into account the perspective of our interlocutor when we choose particular linguistic forms (e.g., referential expressions, prosodic forms)? The aim of this article is to frame the studies we conducted at the LPL as part of this debate. Several audience design models have been proposed in psycholinguistics (e.g., collaborative model, egocentric model, interactive alignment model, dual processing model, probabilistic model, memory-based model) to account for the idea that speakers would not do inferences about the knowledge of their interlocutor continuously. These models diverge on the hypothesis of a more or less systematic use of the common ground in the implementation of audience design. While the collaborative model (Clark, 1996) considers conversation as a constant and joint contribution of the speaker and the listener to the common ground, suggesting a continuous engagement of the audience design in conversation, other models focus on the more or less speaker’s egocentric behavior and on the use of less-demanding automatic mechanisms. The main criticism against the collaborative model challenges the fact that perspective taking via the common ground would require a distinct and cognitively costly representation of knowledge, beliefs and intentions of the interlocutor. The processing costs of such a system would be too high to allow a smooth conversation. The egocentric (e.g., Keysar et al., 2000), interactive alignment (e.g., Pickering & Garrod 2004), probabilistic (e.g., Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011), and memory-based (e.g., Horton & Gerring, 2005) models aim to take into consideration this cognitive cost. The dual processing model (e.g., Bard et al., 2000) attempts to reconcile collaborative and egocentric models by proposing two types of cognitive processes that prevail for linguistic choices: the production of referential expressions that requires making inferences about the knowledge of the interlocutor would involve slow and cognitively demanding processes, while the production of phonetic variations that refers to the speaker’s own recent experience would result from more automatic and rapid processes. At the same time as updating these models, several studies have identified speaker-internal constraints (e.g., memory, executive control, theory of mind) and situational constrains (e.g., visual context) which are likely to influence the involvement of design audience. Except for the dual processing model of Bard et al., models of audience design are mainly based on studies focusing either on the way speakers produce referential forms when referring to the same object at different times and/or with different addresses, or on the way listeners interpret referential forms online, as measured by the monitoring of eye movements (e.g., Keysar et al., 2000). Unlike these studies, our approach consists in studying the prosodic choices (i.e., the melodic and rhythmic choices) the speaker makes during conversation according to the presence of an interlocutor and the knowledge of this interlocutor.The aim of the current article is to describe: (1) the main psycholinguistic models contributing to understand when and how audience design takes place during conversation, and (2) to highlight the work we developed at the LPL in which we adopt a clinical approach to the study of audience design by evaluating the prosodic choices made by individuals with schizophrenia in relation to their difficulties in attributing mental states to others. More generally, our work with healthy participant shows that speakers 1) make different prosodic choices to indicate the relevant part of their message when speaking in the presence of a real interactional partner and when speaking without interlocutor 2) adapt their overall prosody relative to the visual context they share with the interlocutor to facilitate communication.

Keywords

• audience design
• psycholinguistic models
• prosody
• referring expressions
• theory of mind
• cognitive resources