How do people succeed in understanding what the other means?
When people say something, what they mean is rarely, if ever, expressed unambiguously in their speech. Instead, their addressee must ‘guess’ (i.e., infer) what the speaker means based on what they say and on a surprisingly complex, seemingly mind-bending perspective taking: The addressee believes that the speaker has chosen to express their meaning in the chosen formulation because they believe that the addressee will infer their meaning based on what they both know to be mutually known. By working the logic backwards, the addressee infers that meaning.
The apparent complexity of this process raises fascinating questions regarding the cognitive machinery underlying our ability to communicate effectively with others. Although language is rooted in social interactions and used to accomplished things by ensembles of people, it relies on individual language users’ cognitive faculties, such as those involved in memory, meta-cognition, and reasoning.
To examine the processes by which people make sense of each other’s utterances, we collect and analyze unscripted conversations between individuals engaged into goal-oriented tasks. Such conversations reveal what people spontaneously say and do in the course of completing a task, which gives us a unique window into their understanding of the situation as well as their beliefs about the other’s understanding of the same situation.
For a snapshot of some of this research, click here
Selected publications:
Dahan, D. (2023). Collaboration under uncertainty in unscripted conversations: The role of hedges. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001210.
Dahan, D. (2019). Conceptual pacts and definiteness in reference making. Abstracts of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, 24, 41.
Dahan, D. (2019). Individual differences in coordinating meaning and understanding during reference making. 29th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text & Discourse, New York City, July 9-11 2019.
Dahan, D. (2018). Coordinating Meaning and Understanding During Reference Making. Abstracts of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, 23, 4.
Dahan, D. (2017). Constraints on Appealing to Conceptual Pacts in Conversations, Abstracts of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, 22, 18.
Dahan, D., & Solomon, K. (2016). Reference making in unscripted task-oriented dialogues. Abstracts of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, 21, 28.
Dahan, D., Coffel, M., Barney, D. (2016). On the comprehension of referring expressions: the role of coordination in conversation. 29th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 3-5; Gainsville, FL.
Dahan, D., Coffel, M., Barney, D. (2015). On the comprehension of referring expressions: the role of coordination in conversation. Abstracts of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, 20, 271