Self Anchoring and Adjustment in Speaking

Self Anchoring and Adjustment in Speaking

Although addressees do not follow the principle of optimal design, speakers’ behavior implies they do. People speak differently to different audiences (e.g., Fussell, & Krauss, 1989; Krauss & Fussell, 1991). For example, one study demonstrated such “audience design” by asking New Yorkers to describe pictures of New York City to other people (Isaacs & Clark, 1987). When they were talking to other New Yorkers, they tended to use proper names such as “the Citicorp building.” However, when New Yorkers addressed people who were not as familiar with the city, they were more likely to provide a longer description, such as “the building with the slanted roof.” Such audience design suggests that speakers are following the principle of optimal design. Nevertheless, we discovered that speakers, like addressees, use an egocentric anchoring and adjustment mechanism.

What would seem to be an easy action – generating a sentence – requires complex mental machinery (Levelt, 1989). The production of a sentence involves several steps: planning a message (what the speaker intends to say); putting the plan into linguistic form (determining how to say it); and finally articulating it. There is also a monitoring system that triggers revisions when it detects errors.

At what point in this complex process does the speaker design the utterance for the specific addressee? One possibility is that audience design occurs at the outset, so that when speakers plan their messages, they already tailor the plan to their particular addressee. Another possibility is that planning a message is a relatively “egocentric” process – a process that does not take the other’s perspective into account at all – but that the monitoring system is “in charge” of audience design. It could monitor for utterance plans that violate the perspective of the addressee, and then trigger a revision of these plans to make them more sensitive to the mutual knowledge with the addressee.

Horton and Keysar (1996) tested these two models of utterance generation by asking participants to describe various line drawings. The figures were displayed in the context of other figures, and the speakers could use the context in their descriptions. For example, when they described a circle in the context of a larger circle they could say the “small” circle. To test when audience design is employed, two kinds of contexts were used – context figures that were shared with the addressee and context figures that were privileged to the speaker. As optimal design would predict, speakers tended to make reference to the shared context more than to the context that was inaccessible to their addressee. This shows that indeed speakers in the experiment took their addressee’s perspective into account when they described the figures.

Then we asked speakers to start their descriptions quickly, as soon as they saw the figures. It is important to note that the speakers were hurried only in the sense that they had to initiate their utterance immediately; they did not speak at a faster pace than normal. When speakers were hurried, their descriptions were no longer tailored to the perspective of their addressees – they used shared and privileged context to the exact same degree.

These results make sense if one assumes that before people speak, they monitor and correct their utterance plans for violations of their addressee’s perspective. When speakers are under pressure, they do not have sufficient time and resources to monitor and adjust, and so they fall back on the unmonitored utterance plans. Given that speakers did not use the perspective of their addressees when they were hurried, their descriptions reflected egocentric planning. Although this experiment shows that speakers adjust to their addressee’s perspective following an egocentric plan, it does not tell us if the adjustment is sufficient. Later, we describe a study that shows that the adjustments are often insufficient.

These findings suggest an intriguing solution to the audience design goal of speaking: Speakers do not design utterances for their audience from the outset; instead, utterances seem to be tailored specifically for certain addressees only because initial utterance plans that violate the principle of optimal design are monitored, detected and adjusted. Presumably, such a process saves time and effort because in many cases there might not be a need to adjust.