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<C>Question 4. What sources of information do listeners use to make sense of what speakers are
saying?
Understanding what a speaker is saying is a deceptively complex cognitive task. Among other things,
it involves speech perception and parsing, as well as drawing upon metalinguistic knowledge to
interpret co-speech gestures and to make inferences throughout discourse.
Speech perception involves bottom-up auditory perception of the speech stream coupled with
top-down interpretation. Listening conditions are not always perfect, and there can be energetic
masking or informational masking that affects either bottom-up or top-down speech perception
processes, respectively (Mattys et al., 2009). The motor theory (Liberman et al., 1967) assumes that
listeners mimic the speaker’s articulatory movements, and that this provides less variable information
than the speech signal itself. The TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986; McClelland, 1991)
shows how activation across features, phonemes, and words is affected by bottom-up and top-down
processing. The TRACE model provides a reasonable account of how people tend to perceive
ambiguous stimuli as real words rather than nonwords (the lexical identification shift) and how targets
are recognized more quickly when they are present in words rather than nonwords (the word
superiority effect).
Parsing is the process of identifying a grammatical structure in sentences that are read or
heard. In most languages, words in a sentence can often be ambiguous. For instance: “The
government plans to raise taxes were defeated.” In this sentence, a listener might first parse
“government” as a noun and the subject, then parse again to get the correct understanding. Research
on how listeners resolve these kinds of ambiguities sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms of
extracting meaning from the speech stream.
Co-speech gestures are bodily movements that align with what a speaker is saying, and often
contribute additional information to the speaker’s message. When the speech signal is unclear, or
when sentences are ambiguous or incomplete, gestures can provide additional meaning cues to the
listener (e.g., Bavelas et al., 2008; Jacobs & Garnham, 2007).
Inferences are made when a listener makes connections above and beyond what the speaker
explicitly states. Inferences can be either backwards (bridging) or forward (elaborative). Backwards
inferences involve connecting information across two utterances. Forward inferences involve drawing
upon background knowledge to predict what is unsaid. For example, a speaker might say: “Tom went
outside without his umbrella. It is raining.” The listener can infer: “Tom will probably get wet” or
even “Tom is foolishly absent-minded.”
When making sense of what a speaker is saying, listeners continually use a combination of
speech perception, parsing, and background knowledge to aid in comprehension.