An adaptationist psycholinguistic approach to the pragmatics of reference
Rachael Bailes (Edinburgh)
Tuesday 14 October 2016, 10:00–10:30
1.17 Dugald Stewart Building
This thesis formalises two broadly polarised approaches to the question of context integration in linguistic comprehension, and makes explicit the adaptationist particulars that each mechanistic account may imply. The Social Adaptation Hypothesis (SAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is performed by relevance-oriented inferential mechanisms that have been selected for by a social environment (i.e. inference-using conspecifics). In particular, the SAH holds that linguistic conventions are attended to in the same way as other ostensive stimuli, and comprehended on the basis of contextual information. The Linguistic Adaptation Hypothesis (LAH) holds that linguistic comprehension is performed by specialised cognition that has been selected for by a cultural, linguistic environment (i.e. language-using conspecifics). The LAH holds that linguistic conventions may constitute a privileged domain of input for the comprehension system, and in particular that the nature of linguistic representations can support comprehension without mediation by inferential cognition or contextual integration. The remainder of the thesis investigates referential comprehension with a series of four reaction time experiments, using a conversational precedent paradigm, relevant to the contrastive predictions of these two adaptationist accounts. Two additional production experiments measured the effect of visual context on whether speakers maintained their linguistic precedents. The broad question that covers all of these experiments is: how sensitive is the comprehension process to linguistic input qua linguistic input, relative to various other grades of contextual information? In light of the evidence presented and its limitations, I conclude that there is empirical support for the LAH, and that this alternative account should be considered as part of the unfolding conversation on pragmatics in evolutionary linguistics. More broadly, the thesis attempts to demonstrate that psycholinguistic processing is a valuable object of study for evolutionary linguistics, and that evolutionary theory can a useful conceptual tool in psycholinguistics.