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1. Pragmatics and social meaning: Understanding under-informativeness in native and non-native speakers

   Fairchild, Sarah; Mathis, Ariel; Papafragou, Anna (December 2019, International journal of cognitive science engineering and technology)

   Foreign-accented non-native speakers sometimes face negative biases compared to native speakers. Here we report an advantage in how comprehenders process the speech of non-native compared to native speakers. In a series of four experiments, we find that under-informative sentences are interpreted differently when attributed to non-native compared to native speakers. Specifically, under-informativeness is more likely to be attributed to inability (rather than unwillingness) to say more in non-native as compared to native speakers. This asymmetry has implications for learning: under-informative teachers are more likely to be given a second chance in case they are non-native speakers of the language (presumably because their prior under-informativeness is less likely to be intentional). Our results suggest strong effects of non-native speech on social-pragmatic inferences. Because these effects emerge for written stimuli, they support theories that stress the role of expectations on non-native comprehension, even in the absence of experience with foreign accents. Finally, our data bear on pragmatic theories of how speaker identity affects language comprehension and show how such theories offer an integrated framework for explaining how non-native language can lead to (sometimes unexpected) social meanings. 

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2. Social identity, precision and charity: when less precise speakers are held to stricter standard

   https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v1i0.5406  

   Beltrama, Andrea; Schwarz, Florian (December 2022, Semantics and Linguistic Theory)

   Recent has begun to show systematic connections between social information and pragmatic reasoning. These findings raise the question of whether social information shapes comprehenders' assessments of the correctness of linguistic description in light of a single known and determined fact. We explore this question by testing the impact of speaker identity on T(ruth)-V(alue) J(udgment)s based on the interpretation of number words. We find that imprecise statements from speakers socially expected to be less precise – i.e. “Chill" ones – are rejected at a higher rate, and thus held to more stringent evaluation standards, than those from speakers socially expected to speak more precisely – i.e. “Nerdy" ones. We explain the new finding by appealing to the idea that, by virtue of generally being perceived to be more precise, Nerdy speakers are granted higher epistemic credibility than Chill ones. The emerging picture is one in which TVJ assessments are affected by social considerations in a different way from other experimental tasks, suggesting a nuanced interplay between social information and different interpretation tasks and processes 

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3. Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication

   Bao, Yuwei; Ghosh, Sayan; Chai, Joyce (January 2022, Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL))

   Human communication is a collaborative process. Speakers, on top of conveying their own intent, adjust the content and language expressions by taking the listeners into account, including their knowledge background, personalities, and physical capabilities. Towards building AI agents with similar abilities in language communication, we propose Pragmatic Rational Speaker (PRS), a framework extending Rational Speech Act (RSA). The PRS attempts to learn the speaker-listener disparity and adjust the speech accordingly, by adding a light-weighted disparity adjustment layer into working memory on top of speaker’s long-term memory system. By fixing the long-term memory, the PRS only needs to update its working memory to learn and adapt to different types of listeners. To validate our framework, we create a dataset that simulates different types of speaker-listener disparities in the context of referential games. Our empirical results demonstrate that the PRS is able to shift its output towards the language that listeners are able to understand, significantly improve the collaborative task outcome. 

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4. Understanding and Characterizing Speaker Roles within Naturalistic Task-Based Communications: The Fearless Steps APOLO-11 Corpus

   Chandra-Shekar, M.; Hansen, J (December 2022, Acoustical Society of America (Fall Meeting))

   Naturalistic team based speech communications requires specific protocols/procedures to be followed to allow for effective task completion for distributed team members. NASA Apollo-11 was the first manned space mission to successfully bring astronauts to the moon and return them safely. Mission specialists roles within NASA Mission Control (MOCR) are complex and reflected in their communications. In this study, we perform speaker clustering to identify speech segments uttered by the same speaker from recently recovered Fearless Steps APOLLO corpus (CRSS-UTDallas). We propose a pretrained network to obtain speaker embeddings and use a framework that builds on these learned embeddings which achieves a clustering accuracy of 73.4%. We also track/tag key speakers-of-interest across three critical mission phases and analyze speaker roles based on speech duration. NASA communication protocols dictate that information be communicated in a concise manner. In automated communication analysis, individuals higher in trait dominance generally speak more and gain more control over group processes. Hence, speaker duration of primary- versus -secondary speaker and speaker turns are metrics used to determine speaker role. This analysis provides greater understanding of communications protocol and serves as a lasting tribute to the «Heroes Behind the Heroes of Apollo» as well as preserve “words spoken in space.” 

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5. Microaggressions in Context: Linguistic and Pragmatic Perspectives

   https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221133824  

   Holtgraves, Thomas (November 2022, Perspectives on Psychological Science)

   In this commentary I provide a review of the microaggression construct within a linguistic-pragmatic framework. From this perspective, microaggressions can be viewed as nonconventional indirect speech acts, that is, utterances that, because of their aggressive meaning, require some type of inferential processing on the part of the hearer. This inferential process requires a consideration of the remark in the context within which it occurs, including the prior discourse, as well as the roles and statuses of the interactants. Because microaggressions are indirect, the speaker always has the option, especially if they are higher in power, of denying any aggressive meaning. Focusing on their linguistic/pragmatic features allows for the development of a more principled framework for specifying what constitutes a microaggression, as well as helping to identify the relevant features of the context and the processes involved in the recognition of microaggressions. 

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