Papers by Michael Tanenhaus
Cognitive Science, 2015
Although negotiating joint action through dialogue can be difficult, dyads may be able to improve... more Although negotiating joint action through dialogue can be difficult, dyads may be able to improve collaborative performance by managing communicative efficiency in language production, balancing effort (words per turn) with output (turn-level success). Comparing dyads with high, medium, and low levels of accuracy in communication, growth curve modeling revealed a negative relationship between success and excessive variability in levels of efficiency. Dyads performed better by maintaining moderately fluid efficiency (seen in high-success dyads) or minimizing efficiency variability (seen in medium-success dyads), rather than scrambling for efficiency only as needed (seen in low-success dyads). Balancing efficiency variability in language production may create flexible but relatively stable interaction structures, laying the groundwork for successful communication.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2006
Introduction There is disagreement among researchers about the role of gesture in language compre... more Introduction There is disagreement among researchers about the role of gesture in language comprehension; whether it is ignored (Krauss, Dushay, Chen & Rauscher, 1995), processed separately from speech (Goldin-Meadow & Singer, 2003), used only when speakers are ...
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2009
Although nouns are frequently used to refer to just a single category member, nouns name entire o... more Although nouns are frequently used to refer to just a single category member, nouns name entire object categories. Thus, categorizing items is a prerequisite for deciding which particular item is an intended referent. We investigated the categorization process by examining the listeners use of contextually-bound referential domain restrictions during initial reference resolution pitted against a powerful determinant of category membership: visual similarity. Anaphoric one picks out a single item from its antecedent category, so how people determine its referent reveals how they have categorized the items. We examined participants interpretation of another one in a computerized referent selection task while being eye-tracked. Items to be selected varied by their visual similarity and referential domain membership to the antecedent of another one. The eye-movement data reveals that referential domain has a strong effect on object categorization in the earliest moments of reference resolution, modulating the effect of visual similarity.
Cognitive Science, 2015
Context plays a ubiquitous role in language processing. For the most part, work in language proce... more Context plays a ubiquitous role in language processing. For the most part, work in language processing investigates the effects of context without investigating questions about what determines a context. For example, interpretation of any referential expression must take into account the notion of a referential domain. Here we investigate the influence of perceptual cues in establishing a referential domain, or linguistic context. We demonstrate that people use perceptual cues to establish a linguistic context; the influence of perceptual cues is gradient with respect to cue magnitude; and the contribution of a perceptual cue in constructing a linguistic context is not an effect of attention or salience. We provide these results as a first step toward developing a formal model for the establishment of linguistic context.
Indiana University Linguistics Club eBooks, 1975
Cognitive Science, Apr 1, 2003
The question of when and how bottom-up input is integrated with top-down knowledge has been debat... more The question of when and how bottom-up input is integrated with top-down knowledge has been debated extensively within cognition and perception, and particularly within language processing. A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken-word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception through feedback, or post-perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the following phoneme, supporting models with feedback from lexical to phonemic representations. Subsequently, several authors have argued that these results can be fully accounted for by diphone transitional probabilities in a feedforward system (Cairns et al., 1995; Pitt & McQueen, 1998). We report results strongly favoring the original lexical feedback explanation: lexical effects were present even when transitional probability biases were opposite to those of lexical biases.
Journal of experimental psychology, 1981
Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979) reported that orthographically similar rhymes were detected more ... more Seidenberg and Tanenhaus (1979) reported that orthographically similar rhymes were detected more rapidly than dissimilar rhymes in a rhyme monitoring task with auditory stimulus presentation. The present experiments investigated the hypothesis that these results were due to a rhyme production-frequency bias in favor of similar rhymes that was present in their materials. In three experiments, subjects monitored short word lists for the word that rhymed with a cue presented prior to each list. All stimuli were presented auditorily. Cue-target rhyme production frequency was equated for orthographically similar and dissimilar rhymes. Similar rhymes were detected more rapidly in all three experiments, indicating that orthographic information was accessed in auditory word recognition. The results suggest that multiple codes are automatically accessed in word recognition. This entails a re-interpreta*ion of phonological "recoding" in visual word recognition.
Routledge eBooks, Jul 7, 2023
Cognitive Science, 2020
We investigated whether fine-grained coordination in a screenbased puzzle task with a (virtual) p... more We investigated whether fine-grained coordination in a screenbased puzzle task with a (virtual) partner would influence online perspective-taking. Participants played a screen-based puzzle game with a computer player. In the high-coordination condition, the player presented participants with puzzle pieces that could be placed near their partner's last piece. In the lowcoordination condition, pieces could only be placed further away from their partner's last piece. Participant's eye movements were then measured in a referential communication task, with the partner giving the instructions, and whether possible competitor referents were in shared or privileged ground. The results demonstrate clear effects of ground and coordination. Participants in both coordination groups were sensitive to the perspective of the interlocutor. In addition, participants in the high-level coordination condition were more sensitive to statistical regularities in the input and their comprehension was more time-locked to the utterance of the speaker.
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Jan 15, 2006
The MIT Press eBooks, Mar 25, 2011
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Aug 1, 1979
Elsevier eBooks, 1995
Publisher Summary This chapter emphasizes the representations that are formed, as people understa... more Publisher Summary This chapter emphasizes the representations that are formed, as people understand a sentence and the processes involved in developing these representations. This involves recognizing the words in the sentence, determining the syntactic and semantic relationships among the words and phrases, and interpreting contextually dependent expressions. These processes draw upon specifically linguistic knowledge as well as knowledge about the world and the specific context of a sentence or utterance. This chapter also discusses the central theoretical perspectives and empirical questions that are guiding current research on sentence comprehension, and some historical perspective on how the field has developed. In doing so, it focuses primarily on the problem of how readers and listeners determine grammatical relationships as they are processing a sentence. In addition, the chapter also addresses the questions of how people pronounce words and nonwords, the effects of brain injury on performance, the role of phonological and morphological information in word recognition, the effects of differences among orthographies, the use of different decoding strategies, and the role of contextual information.
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Papers by Michael Tanenhaus