Michael Tanenhaus
University of Rochester, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
Two experiments investigated how people assign an interpretation to question phrases. In order to determine the meaning of the WH-phrase (e.g., who, what), a “gap” must be located and the role associated with the gap assigned to the... more
Two experiments investigated how people assign an interpretation to question phrases. In order to determine the meaning of the WH-phrase (e.g., who, what), a “gap” must be located and the role associated with the gap assigned to the WH-phrase. Two experiments tested the Lexical Expectation model of Fodor (1978), according to which lexical properties of the verb determine when a gap is posited, and the All Resorts model of Stowe (1984), according to which all possibilities are considered and evaluated on their pragmatic appropriateness. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the meaningfulness of full sentences. The frequency with which verbs are used transitively determined whether there was an effect of the plausibility of the WH-phrase to act as an object of the verb. Effects of plausibility of the WH-phrase as an object showed up in just those cases where the object role should be assigned to the WH-phrase according to the Lexical Expectation model, rather than as predicted by the All ...
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In order to refer using a name, speakers must believe that their addressee knows about the link between the name and the intended referent. In cases where speakers and addressees learned a subset of names together, speakers are adept at... more
In order to refer using a name, speakers must believe that their addressee knows about the link between the name and the intended referent. In cases where speakers and addressees learned a subset of names together, speakers are adept at using only the names their partner knows. But speakers do not always share such learning experience with their conversational partners. In these situations, what information guides speakers' choice of referring expression? A speaker who is uncertain about a names' common ground (CG) status often uses a name and description together. This N+D form allows speakers to demonstrate knowledge of a name, and could provide, even in the absence of miscommunication, useful evidence to the addressee regarding the speaker's knowledge. In cases where knowledge of one name is associated with knowledge of other names, this could provide indirect evidence regarding knowledge of other names that could support generalizations used to update beliefs about C...
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In a classic paper, Brennan and Clark argued that when interlocutors agree on a name for an object, they are forming a temporary agreement on how to conceptualize that object; that is, they are forming a conceptual pact. The literature on... more
In a classic paper, Brennan and Clark argued that when interlocutors agree on a name for an object, they are forming a temporary agreement on how to conceptualize that object; that is, they are forming a conceptual pact. The literature on conceptual pacts has largely focused on the costs and benefits of breaking and maintaining lexical precedents, and the degree to which they might be partner-specific. The research presented here focuses on a question about conceptual pacts that has been largely neglected in the literature: To what extent are conceptual pacts specific to the local context of the interaction? If conceptual pacts are indeed temporary, then when the local context changes in ways that are accessible to participants, we would expect participants to seamlessly shift to referential expressions that reflect novel conceptualizations. Two experiments examined how referential forms change across context in collaborative, task-oriented dialog between naïve participants. In Expe...
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Chen, Huang, et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2017) found that when reading two-character Chinese words embedded in sentence contexts, contextual diversity (CD), a measure of the proportion of texts in which a word appears, affected... more
Chen, Huang, et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2017) found that when reading two-character Chinese words embedded in sentence contexts, contextual diversity (CD), a measure of the proportion of texts in which a word appears, affected fixation times to words. When CD is controlled, however, frequency did not affect reading times. Two experiments used the same experimental designs to examine whether there are frequency effects of the first character of two-character words when CD is controlled. In Experiment 1, yoked triples of characters from a control group, a group matched for character CD that is lower in frequency, and a group matched in frequency with the control group, but higher in character CD, were rotated through the same sentence frame. In Experiment 2 each character from a larger set was embedded in a separate sentence frame, allowing for a larger difference in log frequency compared to Experiment 1 (0.8 and 0.4, respectively). In both experiments, early and later ey...
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Recent studies have demonstrated that when contextual diversity is controlled token word frequency has minimal effects on visual word recognition. With the exception of a single experiment by Plummer, Perea, & Rayner (2014, Journal of... more
Recent studies have demonstrated that when contextual diversity is controlled token word frequency has minimal effects on visual word recognition. With the exception of a single experiment by Plummer, Perea, & Rayner (2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 275-283), those studies have examined words in isolation. The current studies address two potential limitations of the Plummer et al. First, because Plummer et al. used different sentence frames for words in different conditions, the effects might be due to uncontrolled differences on the sentences. Second, the absence of a frequency effect might be attributed to comparing higher and lower frequency words within a limited range. Three eye-tracking experiments examined effects of contextual diversity and frequency on Mandarin Chinese, a logographic language, for words embedded in the normal sentences. In Experiment 1, yoked words were rotated through the same sentence frame. Experiments 2a an...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Psycholinguistics, Reading, and 5 moreChina, Language, Humans, Eye Movements, and Adult
Research Interests:
Abstract 1. consider the 2 best-known and most commonly investigated types of ambiguity within natural language: lexical and syntactic ambiguity/replicate and extend Pearlmutter and MacDonald's (1992)... more
Abstract 1. consider the 2 best-known and most commonly investigated types of ambiguity within natural language: lexical and syntactic ambiguity/replicate and extend Pearlmutter and MacDonald's (1992) work by determining whether a relatively subtle semantic constraint would interact with syntactic ambiguity resolution/[describes] the results of the corpus-based verb-form availability analysis and presents results of the analyses of variance and regression analyses for the 3 scoring regions/[presents] evidence that subtle differences in ...
Os sintagmas definidos denotam tipicamente entidades que são identificáveis univocamente no fundo conversacional compartilhado pelo falante e pelo ouvinte. No entanto, alguns sintagmas nominais definidos (e.g. ‘o hospital’ em ‘Maria teve... more
Os sintagmas definidos denotam tipicamente entidades que são identificáveis univocamente no fundo conversacional compartilhado pelo falante e pelo ouvinte. No entanto, alguns sintagmas nominais definidos (e.g. ‘o hospital’ em ‘Maria teve que ir pro hospital e João também’) parecem violar a unicidade. Discutimos uma série de experimentos que procuram entender algumas das propriedades dessa classe de definidos. Consideramos, com mais cuidado, a hipótese de que essas interpretações de “definido fraco” surjam de construções implicitamente “incorporadas”, buscando fornecer um esquema da motivação para essa hipótese e suas possíveis consequências. Em nossos experimentos encontramos que, comparados aos definidos regulares, os definidos fracos não denotam univocamente e disparam, de imediato, leituras semanticamente incorporadas que competem efetivamente com as inferências que obtemos normalmente de uma sentença. A descoberta mais surpreendente dos nossos experimentos é talvez que os nomes ...
This paper describes research investigat- ing the on-line production and interpreta- tion of questions, declarative questions, statements and their replies. Specifically, we examine the role of shared and private knowledge in the... more
This paper describes research investigat- ing the on-line production and interpreta- tion of questions, declarative questions, statements and their replies. Specifically, we examine the role of shared and private knowledge in the processing of these constructions in unscripted conversation. Questions provide a critical test case for the use of perspective in language proc- essing because their felicitous use re- quires speakers to distinguish common from private knowledge. Analyses of speech and gaze demonstrate that inter- locutors distinguish shared from private information and that attention is directed toward different types of entities de- pending on utterance form. We argue for a central role of perspective in language processing. Discrepancies in experimen- tal findings regarding use of perspective are discussed in terms of relevance of perspective to the task and the utterances of interest. .
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Spoken Word Recognition in the Visual World Paradigm Reflects the Structure of the Entire Lexicon James S. Magnuson (magnuson@ bcs. rochester. edu) Michael K. Tanenhaus (mtan@ bcs. rochester. edu) Richard N. Aslin (aslin@ cvs. rochester.... more
Spoken Word Recognition in the Visual World Paradigm Reflects the Structure of the Entire Lexicon James S. Magnuson (magnuson@ bcs. rochester. edu) Michael K. Tanenhaus (mtan@ bcs. rochester. edu) Richard N. Aslin (aslin@ cvs. rochester. edu) Delphine Dahan (dahan@ ...
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We ask whether speakers can adapt their productions when feedback from their interlocutors suggests that previous productions were perceptually confusable. To address this question, we use a novel web-based task-oriented paradigm for... more
We ask whether speakers can adapt their productions when feedback from their interlocutors suggests that previous productions were perceptually confusable. To address this question, we use a novel web-based task-oriented paradigm for speech recording, in which participants produce instructions towards a (simulated) partner with naturalistic response times. We manipulate (1) whether a target word with a voiceless plosive (e.g., pill) occurs in the presence of a voiced competitor (bill) or an unrelated word (food) and (2) whether or not the simulated partner occasionally misunderstands the target word. Speakers hyper-articulated the target word when a voiced competitor was present. Moreover, the size of the hyper-articulation effect was nearly doubled when partners occasionally misunderstood the instruction. A novel type of distributional analysis further suggests that hyper-articulation did not change the target of production, but rather reduced the probability of perceptually ambigu...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Experimental Psychology, Communication, and 11 morePhonetics, Psycholinguistics, Speech Production, Linguistics, Language Production, Audience design, Language and Memory, Speech Perception/production Interaction, Hyper- and Hypo-articulation, Hyperarticulation, and Interlocutor Sensitivity
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Most structural Binding Theories predict a complementary distribution between reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrases containing possessors (e.g.... more
Most structural Binding Theories predict a complementary distribution between reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrases containing possessors (e.g. "Ken's picture of himself/him"). In two head-mounted eye-tracking experiments, listeners frequently violated Binding Theory predictions for reflexives, often interpreting the reflexives as taking an antecedent outside of the binding domain, and violating complementarity assumptions. Moreover, the pattern and timing of the eye movements showed Binding Theory violations for reflexives during the earliest moments of reference resolution. The results demonstrate that either binding constraints must be reformulated to decouple pronouns and reflexives or all reflexives in picture noun phrases must be treated as logophors, and thus exempt from structural Binding Theory.
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Most research on the rapid mental processes of online language processing has been limited to the study of idealized, fluent utterances. Yet speakers are often disfluent, for example, saying “thee, uh, candle” instead of “the candle.” By... more
Most research on the rapid mental processes of online language processing has been limited to the study of idealized, fluent utterances. Yet speakers are often disfluent, for example, saying “thee, uh, candle” instead of “the candle.” By monitoring listeners' eye movements to objects in a display, we demonstrated that the fluency of an article (“thee uh” vs. “the”) affects how listeners interpret the following noun. With a fluent article, listeners were biased toward an object that had been mentioned previously, but with a disfluent article, they were biased toward an object that had not been mentioned. These biases were apparent as early as lexical information became available, showing that disfluency affects the basic processes of decoding linguistic input.
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Abstract 1. review and integrate a range of seemingly conflicting results from several laboratories that have studied the effects of referential context in on-line resolution of syntactic ambiguity/present new results from our own... more
Abstract 1. review and integrate a range of seemingly conflicting results from several laboratories that have studied the effects of referential context in on-line resolution of syntactic ambiguity/present new results from our own laboratory, which support the claim that the constraint-based approach best accounts for the available data on this issue/[discuss] 2 general themes: availability of syntactic alternatives and strength of contextual constraint/argue that much of the conflict in results throughout the literature can ...
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Abstract Artificial lexicons have been used with eye-tracking to study the integration of contextual (top-down) and bottom-up information in lexical processing. The present study utilized these techniques to study the role of... more
Abstract Artificial lexicons have been used with eye-tracking to study the integration of contextual (top-down) and bottom-up information in lexical processing. The present study utilized these techniques to study the role of probabilistic information in lexical processing. Participants were trained to associate novel nouns and modifiers, with certain combinations occurring more frequently than others. Participants heard a modifier-noun phrase and were asked to select the words in a display. We predicted that participants would make ...
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Continuous mapping models of spoken word recognition such as TRACE (McClelland and Elman, 1986) make robust predictions about a wide variety of phenomena. However, most of these models are interactive activation models with preset... more
Continuous mapping models of spoken word recognition such as TRACE (McClelland and Elman, 1986) make robust predictions about a wide variety of phenomena. However, most of these models are interactive activation models with preset weights, and do not provide an account of learning. Simple recurrent networks (SRNs, e.g., Elman, 1990) are continuous mapping models that can process sequential patterns and
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Page 1. Acoustic Prominence and Reference Accessibility in Language Production Duane Watson1, Jennifer E. Arnold2, & Michael K. Tanenhaus3 Department of Psychology1,2 & Department of Brain and Cognitive Science3 ...
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... tradition. However, it is important to note that assignment of reference necessarily ... 3.0. Referential domains and syntactic ambiguity resolution 13 Page 14. ... towel, is temporarily ambiguous because it could introduce the Goal... more
... tradition. However, it is important to note that assignment of reference necessarily ... 3.0. Referential domains and syntactic ambiguity resolution 13 Page 14. ... towel, is temporarily ambiguous because it could introduce the Goal as in (3a) or modify the Theme, as in (3b). ...
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Page 1. Context, Syntactic Priming, and Referential Form in an Interactive Dialogue Task: Implications for Models of Alignment Kathleen M. Carbary (kcarbary@bcs. rochester.edu) Ellen E. Frohning (efrohnin@u.rochester.edu ...
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The ambiguity problem takes center stage in models of sentence processing because, to a first approximation, linguistic input is presented sequentially to the processing system in both spoken language and in reading. Thus, even unambiguous... more
The ambiguity problem takes center stage in models of sentence processing because, to a first approximation, linguistic input is presented sequentially to the processing system in both spoken language and in reading. Thus, even unambiguous sequences of speech or text are briefly ambiguous. A rich empirical database now demonstrates that the processing system makes partial commitments that are closely time-locked to the input as it unfolds over time (for recent reviews see Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995, Pickering, Clifton, & Crocker, this ...
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Abstract We examined how naïve conversational participants circumscribed referential domains during the production and comprehension of referring expressions by monitoring participants' eye movements during a referential... more
Abstract We examined how naïve conversational participants circumscribed referential domains during the production and comprehension of referring expressions by monitoring participants' eye movements during a referential communication task. The results ...