Too much information? Hearer sensitivity to over-informativeness in referring expressions

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Cat Davies, RCEAL, University of Cambridge
• Tuesday 23 February 2010, 16:00-17:30
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Chris Cummins.

A growing area of interest within experimental pragmatics is hearer sensitivity to sub-optimal amounts of detail in referring expressions. I will present a series of experiments focusing on hearer sensitivity to over-informativeness, prompted by work by Engelhardt, Bailey & Ferreira (2006) who found no penalty for over-informative utterances by adult raters. We did not replicate Engelhardt et al.’s results, finding instead that over-informative items were penalised relative to their optimal counterparts. Explanations for this discrepancy in the data will be discussed, e.g. over-informative modification as disambiguation, and raters’ relative leniency towards utterances that say too much versus those which say too little.

This talk is part of the RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building
• RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.