Referring Expression Generation (REG) is the task that deals with references to entities appearing in a spoken or written discourse. If these referents are organized in terms of a taxonomy, there are two problems when establishing a reference that would distinguish an intended referent from its possible distractors. The first one is the choice of the set of possible distractrors or contrast set...

In everyday word learning words are only sometimes heard in the presence of their referent, making the acquisition of novel words a particularly challenging task. The current study investigated whether children (18-month-olds who are novice word learners) can track the statistics of co-occurrence between words and objects to learn novel mappings in a stochastic environment. Infants were briefly...

In this paper I propose that a core property of adverbial meaning is the ability (or the lack thereof) of an adverbial to introduce a new time discourse referent. The core data comes from that same day in narrative discourse. I argue that unlike other previously studied temporal adverbials—which introduce a new time discourse referent and relate it to the speech time or a previously mentioned t...

Compared to words that are new to a discourse, repeated words are produced with reduced acoustic prominence. Although these effects are often attributed to priming in the production system, the locus of the effect within the production system remains unresolved because, in natural speech, repetition often involves repetition of referents and lexical items simultaneously. Therefore, repetition r...

Word learning implies learning of both a phonological form and its referent. For nouns, the referent is typically a category of objects, with variability between objects within the category but an overlying similarity that allows them to be categorized together, to function similarly, and to be called by the same label. We hypothesized that by strengthening knowledge of the category of referent...

Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a speaker and two other persons of the same or differ...