This is a past event
Abstract:
An observer's perception of a visual scene influences the language they use to describe it--- which objects they choose to mention and how they characterize the relationships between them. In this talk, I will discuss some experiments on the relationship between visual perception and reference. Using a corpus of descriptions of cartoon people from the childrens' book "Where's Wally", we show that speakers' choice of which objects to mention as landmarks is guided by the objects' visual salience and proximity to the target. Moreover, perceptual salience acts like discourse salience in determining which objects are mentioned first and what kinds of determiners are used for them. In a second experiment using arrays of shapes, we look at the generation of expressions in real time. We analyze the ways in which speakers buy themselves time with filled and unfilled pauses and repeated words, and demonstrate that different scene types and descriptive elements have varied processing demands which are reflected in these time-wasting strategies.
Joint work with Hannah Rohde, Alasdair Clarke, Manjuan Duan, and Marie-Catherine de Marneffe.
Bio:
Micha Elsner is an assistant professor of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. He worked as a postdoc for Sharon Goldwater at the University of Edinburgh from 2011-12. He graduated from Brown University in 2011 with a PhD in Computer Science, advised by Eugene Charniak. His main research areas are discourse coherence, and infant language acquisition.
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~melsner/
- Speaker
- Micha Elsner
- Hosted by
- Artemis Parvizi
- Venue
- Meston 2