LEAP workshop

Our final LEAP meeting of Spring Quarter will take place this Friday, 24 May at 11 am in Cobb 115 (note: this is a different room!) and on Zoom. I, Parker Robbins (PhD student, Linguistics, UChicago), will be presenting.

• Here are the talk details:

  • Title: Must speakers perceive to achieve?: Investigating the role of feedback perception in audience design

  • Abstract:

    Speakers tailor communication to a particular listener based on what they believe that listener knows, a skill called audience design (AD; Clark & Murphy 1982). For example, a UChicago student who is giving directions to a campus visitor may refrain from referring to Regenstein Library as “the Reg” because they assume that a visitor may not understand that abbreviation. In general, speakers are very good at AD (Horton 2005), but sometimes they make mistakes: For example, Navarro et al. 2020 found that speakers under high cognitive load were more likely to make egocentric AD errors in a referential communication task; speakers with higher fluid intelligence and working memory capacity were overall less likely to make errors, however. Though not as well studied as the aforementioned cognitive factors, social factors—especially the ability to make use of feedback cues from listeners—have been shown to be another important part of successful AD (i.a. Horton 2005, Krahmer & Swerts 2005). In this presentation, I will outline a study design that aims to investigate the extent to which failing to perceive feedback cues contributes to failures in audience design. This is joint work with Monica Do and Serpil Karabuklu.

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