INFORME
Grammatical Perspective-Taking in
Comprehension and Production
Carolyn Jane Anderson1
and Brian Dillon2
1Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Wellesley College, Wellesley, EE.UU
2Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, EE.UU
un acceso abierto
diario
ABSTRACTO
Palabras clave: perspectiva, cognitive modeling, Rational Speech Acts, motion verbs
Language use in conversation requires conversation partners to consider each other’s points-
of-view, or perspectives. A large body of work has explored how conversation partners take
into account differences in knowledge states when choosing referring expressions. This paper
explores how well findings from perspective-taking in reference generalize to a relatively
understudied domain of perspective: the processing of grammatical perspectival expressions
like the motion verbs come and go in English. We re-visit findings from perspective-taking
in reference that conversation participants are subject to egocentric biases: they are biased
towards their own perspectives. Drawing on theoretical proposals for grammatical
perspective-taking and prior experimental studies of perspective-taking in reference, nosotros
compare two models of grammatical perspective-taking: a serial anchoring-and-adjustment
modelo, and a simultaneous integration model. We test their differing predictions in a series of
comprehension and production experiments using the perspectival motion verbs come and go
as a case study. While our comprehension studies suggest that listeners reason simultaneously
over multiple perspectives, as in the simultaneous integration model, our production findings
are more mixed: we find support for only one of the simultaneous integration model’s two key
predicciones. More generally, our findings suggest a role for egocentric bias in production for
grammatical perspective-taking as well as when choosing referring expressions.
INTRODUCCIÓN
Language use in conversation requires conversation partners to consider each other’s points-
of-view, or perspectives. This is necessary for successful communication in contexts where
participant information states differ, either because they hold different visual perspectives on
the scene, or differing beliefs. Beyond this, some grammatical phenomena in natural language
are inherently perspectival: their meaning depends on a semantically represented perspective-
holder. This paper explores the production and interpretation of such grammatically perspec-
tival expressions, focusing in particular on the perspectival motion verb come in English.
A large body of existing work has explored how conversation partners take into account differ-
ences in their information states, often referred to as their ‘perspective.’ However, relatively little
work has looked at the processes involved in grammatically perspectival expressions, which encode
reference to point-of-view in their semantics. When an expression must be interpreted relative to a
particular perspective, how do speakers decide whose perspective to use? How to listeners infer
the perspective that is being used when interpreting a grammatically perspectival expression?
Citación: anderson, C. J., & Dillon, B.
(2023). Grammatical Perspective-
Taking in Comprehension and
Production. Mente abierta: Descubrimientos
en Ciencias Cognitivas, 7, 31–78.
https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00071
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00071
Recibió: 20 Agosto 2021
Aceptado: 5 Enero 2023
Conflicto de intereses: Los autores
declare no conflict of interest.
Autor correspondiente:
Carolyn Jane Anderson
carolyn.anderson@wellesley.edu
Derechos de autor: © 2023
Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts
Publicado bajo Creative Commons
Atribución 4.0 Internacional
(CC POR 4.0) licencia
La prensa del MIT
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Early work on perspective-taking in conversation suggested that speakers often fail to take
into account differences between their visual perspective and that of their listener when
choosing referring expressions (Epley, Keysar, et al., 2004; Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar,
2004; Keysar et al., 2000, 2003). These communicative failures were explained as a result
of egocentricity: a cognitive bias towards self perspectives (Epley, Keysar, et al., 2004; Keysar
et al., 2000). Sin embargo, more recent work suggests that conversation partners do take into
account information asymmetries in both production and comprehension (Bezuidenhout,
2013; Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011; Hanna et al., 2003; Hawkins et al., 2021; infierno
et al., 2008, 2016; Kuhlen & Brennan, 2013; Ryskin et al., 2020).
en este documento, we re-visit the question of egocentric bias in a less well-studied domain of
perspective-taking: the production and comprehension of grammatically perspectival expres-
siones. We lay out various models of perspective inference and selection for perspectival
expresiones (anderson & Dillon, 2019; harris, 2012; Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977), focusing in par-
ticular on two models of grammatical perspective-taking: a serial model, the speaker
anchoring-and-adjustment model; and a parallel model, the simultaneous integration model
(Modeling Grammatical Perspective-Taking section).
We test the differing predictions of these models in a series of comprehension and produc-
tion experiments using the perspectival motion verb come as a case study. To foreshadow our
resultados, our comprehension studies (Perspective Inference in Comprehension section and
Comprehension Experiments section) suggest that listeners reason simultaneously over multi-
ple perspectives, as in the simultaneous integration model proposed by Anderson and Dillon
(2019), consistent with Heller et al. (2016) and Ryskin et al. (2020)’s analysis of perspective-
taking in reference. Sin embargo, our production findings (Perspective Selection in Production
section and Production Experiments section) are more mixed: we find support for only one
of the simultaneous integration model’s two key predictions.
Although our results are largely compatible with a simultaneous integration model of gram-
matical perspective-taking, the attested asymmetry between production and comprehension is
problematic for a strongly Bayesian view of conversation, where speakers and listeners itera-
tively finetune their models of each others’ behavior. We conclude with a discussion of how
our grammatical perspective-taking findings fit into the broader picture of perspective-taking in
conversation and rational approaches to conversation (General Discussion section).
PERSPECTIVE-TAKING AND EGOCENTRICITY
Egocentric biases in conversation have been most thoroughly studied in reference. ¿Cómo
conversation participants choose to refer to objects when their partners’ knowledge of the
object might be different than their own? A common way of manipulating the information
states of conversation participants is to set up different visual perspectives on a scene. Uno
common experimental paradigm involves pairs of participants who sit on opposite sides of
a display of boxes such that the contents of some of the boxes are hidden from one participant
(Brown-Schmidt et al., 2008; Hanna et al., 2003; Keysar et al., 2000; Nadig & Sedivy, 2002;
Rubio-Fernández, 2017), setting up an information asymmetry between the two. The extent to
which a speaker considers their listener’s information state then can be measured by compar-
ing how they refer to the visible and obscured objects.
Cifra 1 shows two examples of displays from an experiment using this paradigm reported
in Ryskin et al. (2020). The black boxes represent boxes that are occluded from the view of one
partícipe. When shown the display pictured on the left, a speaker might produce The big
banana to describe the highlighted referent. Sin embargo, if they consider that only one banana
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Cifra 1. Production and comprehension stimuli from Ryskin et al. (2020).
is visible to the listener, they might decide the modifier is unnecessary and produce The
banana. The rate of (unnecessary) modification therefore measures the speaker’s bias towards
their own information state (perspectiva).
In the comprehension version of the task, listeners’ awareness of information asymmetries
can be measured through their reaction times for selecting a referent. The right image in
Cifra 1 shows a paradigm with two size contrasts. If the listener considers that the second
balloon is hidden from the speaker, they can infer that the intended referent is the large banana
as soon as they hear Click on the big…. But if they fail to take into account the speaker’s visual
perspectiva, they may wait to hear whether the next word is banana or balloon.
Early work using this paradigm found that speakers often failed to consider the information
asymmetries caused by differing visual perspectives (Epley, Keysar, et al., 2004; Epley,
Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004; Keysar et al., 2000, 2003; Lin et al., 2010). These findings moti-
vated the proposal of a general cognitive bias towards self-perspectives known as egocentric
inclinación. The intuition is that conversation partners start out using their own perspectives, pero
switch to consider their partners’ perspectives when necessary. In this view, accessing self-
perspectives is automatic, but access to other perspectives comes at a cognitive cost (lin
et al., 2010; Todd & Simpson, 2016; Wardlow, 2013). This is known as the egocentric
anchoring-and-adjustment model of perspective-taking (Epley, Keysar, et al., 2004).
More recent work has called the strength of egocentricity into question (Bezuidenhout,
2013; Brown-Schmidt & Hanna, 2011; Hanna et al., 2003; Hawkins et al., 2021; infierno
et al., 2008, 2016; Kuhlen & Brennan, 2013; Mozuraitis et al., 2018; Ryskin et al., 2020).
After accounting for potential experimental design confounds in earlier visual paradigms
(Bezuidenhout, 2013; Kuhlen & Brennan, 2013), subsequent work has found that speakers
and listeners generally do consider each other’s perspectives when producing and interpreting
referring expressions (Hawkins et al., 2021; Heller et al., 2016). This more recent line of work
proposes that perspective-taking in reference involves simultaneous integration of multiple
perspectives: conversation partners take into account both their own perspective and their
partner’s information state. In this model, referring expressions are produced and interpreted
according to a weighted balance of the egocentric and shared perspective on the scene.
Visual perspective-taking is not the only domain in which information asymmetries
between speakers and listeners have been studied. Other work on information asymmetries
and referring expressions has used mismatches in speaker-listener knowledge about the name
or function of an object (Isaacs & clark, 1987; Mozuraitis et al., 2015, 2018). Por ejemplo,
Mozuraitis et al. (2018) find that speakers modify how they refer to objects based on whether
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they think the listener knows its function. Bergen and Grodner (2012) show that listeners con-
sider the speaker’s likely knowledge state in processing scalar implicatures even in contexts
where the speaker is not present or known. There is also work on spatial deixis in dyadic com-
munication, though most prior work has focused on understanding the semantics of deictic
terms (Rubio-Fernández, 2021; Shin et al., 2020; Skilton & Peeters, 2021).
Although there is ongoing debate over the strength of egocentric biases in reference
perspective-taking, the notion of egocentric bias has been influential across domains. Este
paper explores whether egocentricity effects observed in reference generalize to a domain that
is relatively underexplored in experimental work: the selection and inference of perspective-
holders for grammatically perspectival expressions.
GRAMMATICAL PERSPECTIVE
Perspectival expressions constitute a diverse class of phenomena. A common property of these
expressions is that a component of their meaning refers relative to the perspective of an indi-
individuales. Some perspectival expressions convey the individual tastes or preferences of their
perspective-holder, such as predicates of personal taste (tasty). Others communicate their
beliefs or attitudes, such as expressives (damn) and epithets (that jerk). Still others refer relative
to the perspective-holder’s location (come) or position (bien).
Por ejemplo, the perspectival motion verb come conveys motion towards a particular indi-
vidual in the discourse, referred to as the perspective-holder. Although the perspective-holder
is often the speaker, it need not be. Por ejemplo, en (1), the perspective-holder is the speaker,
while in (2), motion is directed towards the listener.
1. You are coming to my house tonight, Penelope.
I am coming to your house tonight, Penelope.
2.
Not all individuals can serve as perspective-holders; broadly speaking, a perspective-holder
must be a prominent individual in the discourse. All conversation participants are potential
perspective-holders, since they are always important to the discourse. In English, other com-
mon perspective-holders include subjects of attitude verbs and protagonists of narratives.1 For
instancia, en (3), the perspective-holder is Frodo, because he is the protagonist of the novel.
3.
In the second chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf comes to warn Frodo
about the ring.
The factors that determine perspective-holder prominence are the subject of ongoing inves-
tigation. A body of work on predicates of personal taste (p.ej., tasty) suggests that thematic roles
are important (Kaiser, 2020; Kaiser & Sotavento, 2017a, 2017b). Work on Free Indirect Discourse, a
kind of perspective shift environment, suggests that both global discourse factors, like topical-
ity and coherence relations, and local discourse factors, like argument structure and thematic
roles, play a role in determining who can serve as the perspective-holder (Abrusán, 2021;
Bimpikou, 2020; harris, 2012; Hinterwimmer, 2019; Kaiser, 2015; Meuser et al., 2020).
It is also an open question whether various classes of perspectival expressions share a com-
mon semantics. Here we focus on one sub-class of perspectival expressions to investigate the
1 The set of licit perspective-holders varies by language; see Gathercole (1987), Nakazawa (2007), and Barlew
(2017) for further discussion of what is known about cross-linguistic variation.
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
mechanisms underlying grammatical perspective-taking: the perspectival motion verbs come
and go.
Perspectival Motion Verbs
Perspectival motion verbs describe motion relative to a perspective-holder. The perspectival
motion verb come describes motion towards the location of the perspective-holder. As illus-
trated in Figure 2, come can be felicitously used to describe motion towards either the
speaker’s or listener’s location. Sin embargo, it cannot be used felicitously in the context shown
in the None scene, since there is no individual at the destination of motion to serve as the
perspective-holder.
A diferencia de, the motion verb go describes motion that is not towards the location of the
perspective-holder. It is therefore felicitous as a description of the None scene, since no poten-
tial perspective-holder is located at the destination. It can also be used to describe the Listener
scene, if the speaker is the perspective-holder, or the Speaker scene, if the listener is the
perspective-holder. What about the Both scene? This world cannot be felicitously described
using go, because all potential perspective-holders in this context are at the destination of the
movimiento.
Formal analyses of the semantics of come treat its perspectival component differently
(Charnavel, 2018; Fillmore, 1966; Goddard, 1997; Oshima, 2006a, 2006b; Sudo, 2018;
taylor, 1988). For concreteness, we adopt a perspective-anaphoric treatment based on the
arguments presented in Barlew (2017). In this analysis, come is anaphoric to a prominent
perspective in the Common Ground.
4. Lexical semantics of come: [[come(X, d )]]w,a = T iff
(a) Motion implication:
[[∃e.MOVE(X, mi) ∧ DEST(d, mi)]]w,a = T
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Cifra 2. Acceptability of come and go in different contexts.
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(b)
Anchoring implication:
∃y.[[LOC( y, d )]]w,a = T and y is a prominent individual holding perspective a
Where e is an event, d is a location, w is a world, x and y are an individuals, y un
is a perspective.
5. Lexical semantics of go: [[go(X, d )]]w,a = T iff
(a) Motion implication:
(b)
[[∃e.MOVE(X, mi) ∧ DEST(d, mi)]]w,a = T
Anchoring implication:
∃y.[[LOC( y, d )]]w,a = F and y is a prominent individual holding perspective a
Where e is an event, d is a location, w is a world, x and y are an individuals, y un
is a perspective.
We use a to represent variables that range over perspectives, and assume that there is an
assignment function that maps such variables to perspectives prominent in the Common
Ground.
Respectivamente, perspective resolution parallels other sorts of anaphoric expressions, como
pronouns. From a production standpoint, the speaker’s goal is to select a compatible
perspective-holder and a motion verb to describe the intended motion event. From a compre-
hension standpoint, the listener’s goal is to infer the speaker’s adopted perspective and
intended meaning from their utterance. Although we have adopted Barlew (2017)’s anaphoric
analysis for concreteness, this characterization remains the same under competing analyses of
come, insofar as they all involve uncertainty over the identity of the perspective-holder.
Whether or not go is lexically specified as perspectival is an open question. Some analyses
treat go as lexically restricted against motion towards the perspective-holder, making go
ungrammatical in the Both scene (Oshima, 2006a). Sin embargo, others have proposed that go
is infelicitous there because of pragmatic competition with come (Sudo, 2018; Wilkins & Colina,
1995), which leads to an anti-perspectival inference when go is used. The modeling work
presented in Anderson and Dillon (2019) suggests that both views are viable and empirically
difficult to distinguish. We use a perspectival semantics for go, though our core predictions do
not rest on it.
Although perspectival motion verbs are the subject of significant cross-linguistic compara-
tive work (Barlew, 2017; Gathercole, 1987; Nakazawa, 2007, 2009; Wilkins & Colina, 1995),
there is relatively little experimental work on them. This gap leaves open many questions
about their usage, and relates to models of grammatical perspective-taking. We turn now to
estos modelos.
Egocentricity in Grammatical Perspective-Taking
Although perspectival expressions are a diverse category, one of their shared characteristics is
a tendency to be interpreted relative to the speaker’s perspective (Fillmore, 1966; harris &
Potts, 2009; Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977; Lasersohn, 2005; Potts, 2005, 2007). There is a growing
body of work focused on quantifying the strength of this preference for speaker perspectives in
grammatical perspective-taking (harris, 2012; harris & Potts, 2009; Kaiser, 2015; watson
et al., 2021), but its source remains a topic of debate.
The preference for speaker perspectives cannot be hard-coded into the grammar of per-
spectival expressions, since the set of perspective-holders is contextually determined (Barlew,
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
2017; harris, 2012). Como consecuencia, some work has attempted to encode it via a rule-based
approach to perspective selection (Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977) or via obligatory grammatical pro-
cesses (Speas & Tenny, 2003).
More recent work takes inspiration from models proposed for reference perspective-taking
and posits that the preference is a result of egocentric bias (anderson & Dillon, 2019; harris,
2012; Watson et al., 2021). In this view, there is a general cognitive bias towards self perspec-
tives, which causes speakers to preferentially use their own perspectives when producing
perspectival expressions.
Appealing to a general cognitive bias is attractive, because it offers a unified explanation for
effects in the reference perspective-taking and grammatical perspective-taking domains. Cómo-
alguna vez, there are a number of differences between the two domains that may complicate
attempts to extrapolate from what is known about perspective-taking in reference to grammat-
ical perspective-taking.
Primero, work on perspective-taking in reference explores information asymmetries between
the speaker and listener, whether caused by differences in participants’ visual viewpoints
(Heller et al., 2016; Ryskin et al., 2020), or by differences in knowledge about an object visible
to both participants (Mozuraitis et al., 2015, 2018). Differences in grammatical perspective, en
the other hand, can arise even if all conversation participants are in the same information state.
Segundo, the expressions investigated in reference perspective-taking are not grammatically
perspectival: they consist of simple referring expressions. In grammatical perspective-taking,
the semantics of the expressions of interest contain a free perspectival variable whose referent
is contextually determined.2 Thus, even if the speaker and listener have identical information,
the identity of the perspective-holder may be ambiguous, in the same way that the antecedent
of a pronoun may be ambiguous.
Por último, perspectival expressions have a unique perspective-holder. In reference perspective-
tomando, it is possible to integrate the knowledge states of the speaker and listener to varying
degrees: we can construct a Common Ground perspective consisting only of objects visible
to both participants. In grammatical perspective-taking, sin embargo, the perspective-holder must
be identified with a unique individual. If the speaker is in Seattle and the listener is in Boston,
the perspective-holder is either on one coast or the other; there is no potential Common
Ground perspective-holder in the Midwest.
MODELING GRAMMATICAL PERSPECTIVE-TAKING
Because of the differences between reference perspective-taking and grammatical perspective-
tomando, we do not expect the two domains to involve identical processes and biases. Sin embargo,
the models and frameworks from perspective-taking in reference can help guide our thinking
about the production and comprehension of grammatically perspectival expressions. En esto
sección, we lay out two models of grammatical perspective-taking that draw on prior models
of reference perspective-taking (Epley, Keysar, et al., 2004; Heller et al., 2016; Keysar et al.,
2000; Mozuraitis et al., 2018; Ryskin et al., 2020) and theoretical work on grammatical
perspective-taking (harris, 2012; Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977): a serial model that encodes a strong
2 In the perspective-anaphoric treatment we adopted in Modeling Grammatical Perspective-Taking section.
Alternative analyses of perspectival motion verbs also involve a perspectival variable, but at different levels of
representación: indexical approaches posit a perspectival field in the context parameter (Lasersohn, 2005;
Oshima, 2006a), and logophoric binding accounts posit a logophoric pronoun that binds the perspectival var-
iable (Charnavel, 2020).
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bias towards the speaker’s perspective, and a parallel model in which multiple perspectives
are considered simultaneously.
Anchoring-and-Adjustment Models
One hypothesis about grammatical perspective-taking is that it is governed by a hierarchy of
perspective-holders. Kuno and Kaburaki (1977) propose an analysis of come where its
perspective-holder is determined according to an empathy hierarchy: the availability of a
perspective-holder depends on the degree that the speaker identifies with the individual.
6. Speech-Act Empathy Hierarchy (Kuno & Kaburaki, 1977):
(a) The speaker empathizes most strongly with themselves.
(b) The speaker empathizes more closely with the listener than third persons.
(C) The speaker empathizes most with the subject of the sentence.
(d) After the subject, the object is the easiest to empathize with.
(mi) Objects of passive by-agentive clauses are the hardest to empathize with.
Although not proposed as an explicit processing model of perspective-taking, the empathy-
based approach to perspective prominence bears a strong similarity to egocentric anchoring-
and-adjustment models of reference perspective-taking (Epley, Keysar, et al., 2004; Keysar
et al., 2000), since it assumes a serial model of perspective-taking. In both views, there is a
default perspective that the speaker always selects, and the speaker switches to another
perspective when the default perspective is unavailable or infelicitous.
If we view Kuno’s empathy hierarchy as a set of perspective selection and inference heu-
ristics, we can adapt them into a model of grammatical perspective-taking. The result would
be a serial model of grammatical perspective-taking, in which conversation participants first
adopt the perspective that they empathize most closely with. If this perspective is incompatible
with the given context, then they select another perspective, according to the empathy
hierarchy: the speaker, then the listener, then third-persons based on their grammatical role.
In production, this serial model predicts a strong preference for speaker perspectives:
speakers should use their own perspective whenever possible, since they empathize most
closely with themselves.
For comprehension, there is a choice to be made. If egocentricity is a general cognitive
inclinación, then we would expect it to influence listeners as well as speakers. En ese caso, listeners should
first interpret a perspectival expression according to their own perspective. If the resulting
interpretation is infelicitous, they would then switch to the speaker’s perspective. This is sim-
ilar to the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model of perspective-taking put forward in the
reference domain in Epley, Keysar, et al. (2004) and Keysar et al. (2000).
Alternativamente, we could treat egocentricity as a kind of guiding heuristic, rather than a strong
cognitive bias. En este caso, listeners might actually anticipate a speaker’s own egocentric bias,
and use it to guide their interpretation. In this model, listeners will select the speaker’s perspec-
tive first, and use their own only if the speaker’s is incompatible with the context (es decir., el
sentence would be infelicitous).
Which of these interpretations of egocentricity is most promising for the grammatical
perspective-taking domain? We draw here on the existing experimental work on grammatical
perspective-taking, which finds a strong preference for speaker-oriented interpretations of
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epithets, expressives, and predicates of personal taste in comprehension (harris, 2012; Kaiser,
2015; Kaiser & Sotavento, 2017a, 2017b). The data from these comprehension experiments suggest
that comprehenders are guided by awareness of the speaker’s self-bias.
These findings lead Harris (2012) to adopt the latter view of egocentricity. He proposes a
two-stage model of perspective inference, where listeners have both a complex perspective
reasoning system and a simpler heuristic-based system. In the simpler system, listeners assume
that by default, speakers use their own perspectives.3 When necessary, listeners can switch to
the more complex perspective reasoning system and take multiple perspectives into consider-
ación. This switch is triggered when the sentence would be infelicitous according to the
speaker’s perspective.
Drawing on Keysar et al. (2000) and Epley, Keysar, et al. (2004)’s model of perspective-
taking in reference, as well as Harris (2012)’s approach to speaker bias, we call this a speaker
anchoring-and-adjustment model of grammatical perspective-taking: both speakers and lis-
teners consider the speaker’s perspective by default. In the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment
modelo, the speaker’s perspective is the default in both comprehension and production. Com-
prehenders will first attempt to interpret perspectival expressions according to the speaker’s
perspectiva, and speakers will produce expressions according to their own perspectives,
unless the context eliminates the speaker’s perspective.
Simultaneous Integration
A competing hypothesis about grammatical perspective-taking is that conversation partners
reason about multiple perspectives simultaneously. In the simultaneous integration view of
perspective-taking, speakers and listeners are aware that their perspectives may differ from that
of their partner, and use their awareness of multiple perspectives to guide production and
comprensión.
Anderson and Dillon (2019) propose a simultaneous integration model of grammatical
perspective-taking formulated in the Rational Speech Acts framework. In this model, listeners
probabilistically reason jointly about the speaker’s intended meaning and their adopted per-
spective using a mental model of the speaker’s production process. Although Anderson and
Dillon (2019) propose a model for comprehension only, we extend their Perspectival Rational
Speech Acts model to the production of grammatically perspectival expressions as well.
In this simultaneous integration model, the listener’s task is to simultaneously
Comprehension.
infer the speaker’s intended meaning and their adopted perspective. Rather than selecting a
single perspective (p.ej., the speaker’s) and attempting to interpret the speaker’s utterance, as in
the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, the listener reasons jointly over all perspective-
meaning pairs. Como resultado, the listener takes into account all possible perspectives jointly
during inference. To settle on the speaker’s intended meaning, the listener then marginalizes
over all possible perspectives.
This results in a simultaneous consideration of all perspectives, as in the simultaneous inte-
gration model for reference perspective-taking proposed in Hawkins et al. (2021), Heller et al.
(2016), and Ryskin et al. (2020). In the Anderson and Dillon (2019) modelo, like in the Hawkins
3 Harris’s heuristic system also incorporates a preference for the last-used perspective; since the simulations
and experiments that we present do not involve multiple perspectival expressions, this is less relevant for the
present investigation.
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et al. (2021) model of reference perspective-taking, the integration of the multiple perspectives
is done through joint Bayesian inference rather than by calculating a weighted combination of
perspectives, as in the Ryskin et al. (2020) modelo.
In production, the speaker’s goal is to select the best utterance-perspective pair to
Production.
communicate their intended meaning, which they do by reasoning about how the listener will
interpret each candidate utterance. Because the speaker cannot directly communicate the
adopted perspective to the listener, they must consider how the listener will interpret an utter-
ance according to each potential perspective that the listener might adopt. The most useful
utterance is the one that is most likely to be understood by the listener under all possible per-
spectives. As in the simultaneous integration model for reference perspective-taking, sin embargo,
the listener may be more likely to adopt some perspectives than others. The speaker takes this
into account by setting a prior probability on each perspective in their model of the listener.
Although the speaker jointly calculates the probabilities of utterance-perspective pairs, ellos
ultimately select a single utterance to produce by marginalizing over all perspectives. Este
results in a simultaneous integration model: the speaker’s choice of utterance takes into
account its interpretation according to all perspectives.
Iterated Recursive Reasoning. The Anderson and Dillon (2019) model employs recursive Bayes-
ian reasoning. The actual listener is represented by a model called the Pragmatic Listener.
Given an utterance u from the speaker, the Pragmatic Listener’s goal is to estimate the joint
probability of the speaker’s intended meaning w, modeled as a possible world they are
describing, and the speaker’s adopted perspective a. For each possible meaning that the
speaker could be trying to communicate, the listener’s goal is to estimate its likelihood given
the speaker’s utterance. Sin embargo, the meaning of an utterance containing a perspectival
expression depends on the perspective that has been adopted. Since the speaker’s choice of
perspective is not directly observable, the listener tries to estimate the probability of meaning-
perspective pairs (pag(w, a|tu)), and then marginalizes over the set of possible perspectives to find
the most likely meaning (MAXw p(w|tu)).
Their calculation takes into account two things: how likely they think the possible world is
(pag(w)), and how likely they think the speaker is use the given utterance to express that partic-
ular world-perspective pair (pag(tu|w, a)). The listener estimates the prior probability of the mean-
ing according to their own set of beliefs about the world. They estimate the second component
by relying on a mental model of the speaker’s production process: the Pragmatic Speaker.
The Pragmatic Speaker’s goal is to select a perspective-utterance pair to express their
intended meaning w. Eso es, they are reasoning jointly over the utterance/perspective pair that
is most likely to communicate w successfully to the listener: their goal is to calculate the like-
lihood that each utterance/perspective pair will lead to success (pag(tu, a|w)). Para hacer esto, ellos
take into account the likelihood of the listener understanding their utterance (pag(w|tu, a)), como
estimated by running a simplified model of the listener called the Literal Listener. They also
take into account the prior probability of the perspective (pag(a)), and of the utterance given the
perspectiva (pag(tu|a)).
The Literal Listener is the speaker’s simplified mental model of the listener. Its task is to infer
the probability of a world given a perspective-utterance pair, pag(w|tu, a), which it does by eval-
uating the utterance according to the world and perspective, and taking into account the prior
probability of the world and the perspective. The Literal Listener does not correspond to a real-
world listener, since perspectives are not usually directly observable.
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This model was originally proposed by Anderson and Dillon (2019) as a concrete imple-
mentation of Harris (2012)’s second-stage abductive reasoning system for grammatical
perspective-taking in comprehension. We extend the Anderson and Dillon (2019) model to
production by adding an additional Pragmatic Speaker level to model the actual speaker. Este
allows us to model a speaker who reasons about their listener’s perspective inference process
using the Pragmatic Listener as its mental model of the listener. Como resultado, our extended PRSA
model is more similar to Hawkins et al. (2021)’s fully Bayesian model of reference perspective-
taking than to the simultaneous integration model proposed in Heller et al. (2016) and Ryskin
et al. (2020), in which only the listener engages in recursive Bayesian reasoning.
In the Anderson and Dillon (2019) modelo, both the speaker and listener are
Perspective Cost.
aware that the speaker may be biased towards their own perspectives. The speaker’s egocen-
tric bias is incorporated through the use of a perspective cost function. This cost function
penalizes non-speaker perspectives in the model of the speaker. A higher perspective cost
setting results in speaker behavior that is more egocentric; a perspective cost of zero results
in equal weighting of all perspectives.
We note that the perspective cost also affects the listener. Because the Pragmatic Listener’s
calculation relies on the Pragmatic Speaker, manipulating the perspective cost affects the
listener’s behavior as well as the speaker’s. As the perspective cost increases, comprehenders
are more likely to assume that the speaker is using their own perspective.
Extended Perspectival Rational Speech Acts model. The resulting Perspectival Rational Speech
Acts model for comprehension and production is expressed formally in Figure 3. We show
the joint inference equation as well as the final marginalization step which the listener uses
to settle on a single interpretation and the speaker uses to select an utterance to produce.
The PRSA model achieves the same kind of perspective-mixing assumed in the Heller et al.
(2016), Mozuraitis et al. (2018), and Ryskin et al. (2020) simultaneous integration model of
reference perspective-taking and the Watson et al. (2021) model of grammatical
perspective-taking, but through different mathematical means. Their model uses an explicit
perspective-mixing parameter to explore bias towards a particular perspective. By default,
Cifra 3. Perspectival Rational Speech Acts model (revisado).
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the PRSA assumes equal weight on all perspectives due to the marginalization operation; cómo-
alguna vez, perspective bias can be explored by manipulating the perspective cost function.
Summary
The speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models of grammatical
perspective-taking represent two different ways of thinking about perspective inference and
selección. In the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, conversation participants select
one perspective at a time, and only reconsider their choice if the given perspective is not com-
patible with the discourse context. In the simultaneous integration model, por el contrario, conver-
sation participants consider multiple perspectives at once. Each incorporates an egocentric
bias in production: in the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, the speaker’s perspective
is always selected first, while in the simultaneous integration model, non-speaker perspectives
are more costly for the speaker to adopt. The different assumptions that each model makes
about how conversation participants select perspectives lead to different predictions about
how conversation participants will use and interpret grammatically perspectival expressions.
These two models correspond to the two systems for perspective inference posited by
harris (2012). The speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model is a heuristic-based system,
which may fail, causing the listener to re-sample a perspective and try again. This corresponds
to the simpler first-stage model. The simultaneous integration model corresponds to the
segundo, more complex system that listeners have in Harris (2012)’s proposal. We take the
mathematical model for the latter comprehension system from Anderson and Dillon (2019)
and extend it to the production of grammatically perspectival expressions.
Integrating the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models for
comprehension corresponds to Harris (2012)’s proposed two-stage model of comprehension,
with some sort of contextual evidence providing a cue to switch between the two.4 Adopting
only the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model for both comprehension and production
would parallel the theoretical treatment of perspective proposed in Kuno and Kaburaki
(1977). Combining the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model of production with the
simultaneous integration model of comprehension would lead to a model similar to the one
that Kehler and Rohde (2013) propose for pronominalization, in which listeners consider more
sources of evidence than speakers.
Having outlined two competing models of grammatical perspective-taking for both com-
prehension and production, we turn to testing their predictions about perspective inference
in comprehension and perspective selection in production. In Perspective Inference in Com-
prehension section and Comprehension Experiments section, we explore their predictions for
grammatical perspective-taking in comprehension, and present three comprehension experi-
ments that test a key difference between them. In Perspective Selection in Production section
and Production Experiments section, we discuss the predictions that each model makes for
producción, and provide empirical evidence about perspective selection in two key contexts.
The predictions that we present are generated using computational implementations in the
WebPPL probabilistic programming language. For the simultaneous integration model, nosotros
generate predictions using perspective costs ranging from 0 (no speaker bias) a 1 (strong
speaker bias). Our code can viewed through the Open Science Foundation.5
4 See Anderson (2021) for an argument that the production domain does not provide sufficient evidence to
motivate the kind of switch Harris (2012) posits for comprehension.
5 https://osf.io/3bsnz/?view_only=1091b1607b864161860f84dcafe3e425.
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PERSPECTIVE INFERENCE IN COMPREHENSION
In comprehension, listeners must infer the speaker’s intended meaning and their adopted per-
perspectiva. This section explores the predictions that the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and
the simultaneous integration models make for grammatical perspective-taking in
comprensión.
We look at model predictions for three sentence frames: X is going to the market, X is com-
ing to the market, and X is walking to the market. The lexical semantics for the verbs are shown
En figura 4. Note that it follows from the semantics of come that the subject cannot be the
perspective-holder, since it is impossible to be simultaneously in motion towards a place
and already located at that place.
We use these semantics for all models; models differ only in their perspective selection and
inference mechanisms. We assume the same interpretation function for all models: given a
world (utterance context) and a perspective, the interpretation function maps an utterance
to a truth-value according to the lexical semantics in Figure 4.
In what follows, we represent utterance contexts with illustrated scenes. We consider a set
of perspective-taking scenarios with two locations (aquí, the house and the market) and three
individuals: a speaker, Sam, a listener, Lucy, and a third person, Thelma, whose perspective is
not accessible. We focus on the set of six scenes presented in Figure 5. We include four scenes
where Thelma is the mover and two where the speaker, Sam, is the mover. When Sam is the
mover, Thelma is absent from the scene in order to make it clear that she is not a potential
perspective-holder.
Speaker Anchoring-and-Adjustment Comprehension Predictions
Recall that in the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, listeners first try to interpret gram-
matically perspectival expressions according to the speaker’s own perspective, and if this inter-
pretation fails, the listener selects a different perspective and tries again.
This model predicts that comprehenders should initially expect the speaker to be located at
the destination of motion when presented with an utterance containing come, since they
expect the speaker to be the perspective-holder, and come requires the perspective-holder
Cifra 4.
Lexical semantics for candidate verbs.
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Cifra 5. Set of possible scenes with two locations, the house and the market, and three refer-
ents. In all scenes, Speaker Sam is marked with an S and Listener Lucy is marked with an L. Thelma
Third Person is unmarked.
to be at the destination of motion. Out of the six scenes we consider, only the Both and
Speaker scenes satisfy this expectation. Fundamentalmente, this model predicts no difference between
these two scenes, since the listener’s perspective is not considered when the speaker’s is
disponible.
If the speaker-oriented interpretation fails, the listener will re-analyze according to another
perspectiva: their own. This leads them to expect the listener to be at the destination of motion
(Listener, Speaker Moving Listener). The Speaker Moving Listener and Listener conditions dif-
fer only in when the speaker-oriented interpretation is predicted to fail: in the Speaker Moving
Listener condition, unlike the Listener condition, the utterance itself (I am coming) indicates
that the speaker is not using their own perspective. Use of come when no one is at the des-
tination is predicted to be ungrammatical (None, Speaker Moving None).
De este modo, the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model predicts a Simple Speaker Advantage
for utterances with come: all scenes where the speaker is at the destination are equally likely,
and more likely than any others. Given an utterance Thelma is coming …, the listener should
rank the scenes in likelihood as follows: {Speaker, Ambos} > {Listener} > {None}. Given an utter-
ance I am coming …, they should rank the possible scenes in likelihood as follows: {Speaker
Moving Listener} > {Speaker Moving None}. Sin embargo, the second utterance is surprising in
this model: listeners will expect the speaker to produce I am going or I am walking, since they
are compatible with the speaker’s perspective.
Simultaneous Integration Comprehension Predictions
The simultaneous integration model of comprehension posits that listeners consider multiple
possible perspective-holders at once. Como resultado, the simultaneous integration model predicts
that come is most likely to describe a scene where multiple potential perspective-holders are at
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
the destination of motion. This follows from the listener’s consideration of the speaker’s pro-
duction process: come is most useful when it is a valid description of the intended scene
according to all potential perspectives.
We call this the Convergent Perspective Boost: the Both scene receives a boost in proba-
bility when the perspectives of the potential perspective-holders converge, because the scene
is compatible with multiple perspective-holders (both speaker and listener). Because of this
efecto, the simultaneous integration model predicts that when listeners hear Thelma is coming
…, they will place the highest probability on the scene in which both potential perspective-
holders are at the destination of motion (Ambos).
The scenes in which only one candidate perspective-holder is at the destination will also be
somewhat likely (Speaker, Listener); their relative probability depends on the perspective cost
function setting. Use of come when no one is at the destination is predicted to be unlikely,
since it is ungrammatical (None, Speaker Moving None).
The model therefore predicts that given an utterance Thelma is coming …, the listener
should rank the scenes in likelihood as follows: {Ambos} > {Speaker} > {Listener} > {None},
assuming that there is a non-zero perspective cost.
Unlike in the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, listeners should not be surprised
by the speaker producing I am coming …; en este caso, they should infer with high probability
that the speaker is describing the Speaker Moving Listener scene. De hecho, since the perspective-
holder is unambiguous when the speaker is the subject of the motion verb, I am coming …
should be easier for listeners to interpret than Thelma is coming …, since they can infer with
certainty that the scene is the Speaker Moving Listener one, rather than spreading some prob-
ability across the Both, Speaker, and Listener scenes.
Summary
The speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models of comprehen-
sion make different predictions about perspective inference in comprehension when a third
character is moving. The critical difference lies in the predicted relative probability of the Both
and Speaker scenes. The speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model considers only one per-
spective at a time, and essentially reduces them to the same scenario: both scenes benefit from
the Simple Speaker Advantage. The simultaneous integration model, por el contrario, predicts an
advantage for the Both scene over the Speaker scene due to the Convergent Perspective Boost:
come is felicitous in this scene according to either candidate perspective-holder. We test this
key difference in the predictions of the two models in a series of comprehension experiments.
COMPREHENSION EXPERIMENTS
We ran three experiments to explore a key difference between the predictions of the two
modelos. As detailed above, the simultaneous integration model critically predicts a Convergent
Perspective Boost: the most likely scene to be described by Thelma is coming is the Both
scene. Por el contrario, the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model predicts a Simple Speaker
Advantage: all scenes where the speaker is at the destination should be equally likely, porque
they are consistent with the first-selected perspective, that of the speaker.
We summarize the predictions of the two models in Figure 6. When a listener hears Thelma
is coming, according to the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, they should find the
Both and Speaker scenes equally, and the Listener scene less likely, but possible. According
to the simultaneous integration model, they should find the Both scene most likely, seguido
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Cifra 6. Ranked likelihood of scenes given Thelma is coming to the market as ranked by Con-
vergent Perspective Boost versus Simple Speaker Advantage.
by the Speaker scene, and then the Listener scene, with the relative likelihood of the last two
depending on the strength of the perspective cost.
We test these predictions in a series of paired sentence/picture compatibility judgment
tareas. We use illustrated scenes to represent an observed world (significado) that the speaker
seeks to communicate. In our paradigm, participants first saw a sentence being spoken by a
personaje, and then a scene depicting an utterance context for the sentence. Their task was to
judge whether the scene and sentence were compatible.
In this paradigm, our linking hypothesis is that participants should be fastest to accept
scenes when they depict worlds that the listener thinks the speaker is likely to be describing
with the given utterance (es decir., worlds with high marginal posterior probability in the listener’s
comprehension model). Somewhat more formally, we suppose that reaction time in this task is
monotonically related to the surprisal (negative log probability) of a world given a sentence
(following Nordmeyer and Frank (2014)).
Materials, datos, and analysis scripts for all experiments are hosted by the Open Science
Foundation.6
Experiment 1a
Experiment 1a is a paired sentence/picture compatibility judgment task exploring the relative
compatibility of the Speaker and Both scenes with come.
Métodos
Participantes. 128 monolingual American English-speaking participants were recruited through
Prolific. Participants who achieved less than 90% accuracy on a spatial control task (descrito
abajo) were excluded from the experiment (norte = 48), leaving 80 participants in the final
6 https://osf.io/3bsnz/?view_only=1091b1607b864161860f84dcafe3e425.
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Cifra 7.
Stimuli characters.
análisis. This rejection criterion, as well as the experimental procedures and planned analyses
described below, were preregistered through AsPredicted.7
Materials. This experiment employed a 4 × 2 within-participants design, crossing scene type
(4 niveles) and motion verb (perspectival versus non-perspectival).
The materials used three cartoon characters: Sam, Lucy, and Thelma (Cifra 7). In the com-
prehension experiment, participants were asked to imagine themselves as Lucy. Participantes
were introduced to Sam, Lucy’s friend, and told that Sam “sometimes gets confused and says
things that don’t make sense.” Their goal was, given an illustration of a scene, to decide
whether what Sam was saying was appropriate in the context.
Había 4 versions of the scene: one with both the speaker and listener at the destination
of motion (Both scene); one with the speaker at the destination and the listener at the other
ubicación (Speaker scene); one with the listener at the destination and the speaker at the other
ubicación (Listener scene); and one where neither the listener nor the speaker were at the des-
tination (None scene). An example of a Both scene is shown in Figure 8 (izquierda). In scenes in
which the speaker and listener are not located in the same place, they were depicted talking
to each other on the phone (Cifra 8 bien).
Each scene was matched with two versions of the sentence: one using come, the perspec-
tival condition; and one using a manner-of-motion verb such as walk or drive.8 Thus, allá
were two sentence conditions: Perspectival and Plain. The Plain conditions were introduced
as a control condition to index the baseline difficulty of processing the different scenes. Nosotros
had no a priori predictions for RT rates for the Plain conditions. We reasoned that any process-
ing boost for a scene that matched the perspective assigned to a perspectival motion verb
should occur above and beyond the ease of processing the scene.
Spatial Control Task. Our experiment rests on the ability of participants to adopt the perspective
of the listener character. If they are unable to fully take this character’s perspective, the exter-
nal validity of our task is suspect. To measure how well participants adopted Lucy’s perspec-
tivo, we included spatial control items throughout the experiment. These items set up contrasts
between the participant’s visual perspective and Lucy’s perspective.
7 https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=xa47j8.
8 The manner-of-motion descriptions used were: walking, driving, on the way, en route, skateboarding, y
headed to.
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Cifra 8. Comprehension stimuli.
We included three kinds of contrasts. In the Close condition of the spatial control items,
Sam makes a statement about the item closest to him in the scene. The scene depicts an object
close to Sam and a distractor object that is closest to the scene viewer (the participant’s visual
perspectiva). In the Between condition, Sam makes a statement about an object between Lucy
and a reference point, or between himself and a reference point. There is a distractor between
the reference point and scene viewer. The third condition involved right and left contrasts
between Sam and the participant’s visual perspective. This condition was predicted to be more
challenging and was not used to exclude participants.9
An example spatial control item is shown in Figure 9. In this scene, the animal between the
participant and the couch is a cat, but the animal between Lucy and the couch is a dog. Este
description-scene pair should be accepted only if participants have adopted Lucy’s spatial
perspectiva.
Participants who missed more than 1 item from the Between and Close conditions were
excluded from the study. We rely on this measure to determine whether participants success-
fully adopted Lucy’s perspective as instructed.
In addition to the 20 spatial control items discussed above, 30 filler items were
Filler Items.
incluido. Like the main items, these items depicted the three characters Thelma, Sam, y
Lucy in scenes with two possible locations. Most filler items depicted non-motion activities.
Some showed Thelma moving, but towards a location on the left rather than the right. Others
showed the speaker or listener characters moving. 20 filler items were paired with false
descripciones, y 10 were paired with true descriptions (Cifra 10).
Procedimiento. Había 4 (scene type) × 2 (motion verb) condiciones. Participants saw 6 items in
each of the 8 condiciones. Items were distributed into 8 Latin Square lists, and combined with
30 fillers and 20 spatial control items, for a total of 98 elementos. Participants also completed 4
training items before the experiment began. Stimuli were displayed and responses collected
9 In Experiment 1a, the average accuracy on the Close and Between conditions for participants not excluded
from the study was 97%, compared to 91% for the left/right condition.
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Cifra 9. Comprehension spatial stimulus.
using the Ibex Farm platform for web-based experiments (Drummond, 2019). Each experimen-
tal session began with an informed consent form and concluded with a demographic survey
and a debriefing survey, which allowed participants to report any issues with the survey and
contained two free-response bot-check questions.
For each experimental item, participants were first shown an image of Sam’s head with a
speech bubble containing the target sentence. Then they saw a scene depicting the conversa-
ción, and were given 10 seconds to indicate whether or not the picture and sentence matched.
If they did not respond within this time window, they were told that they were too slow, y
the experiment moved to the next item.
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Cifra 10. Comprehension stimuli.
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Both reaction times (how quickly, in milliseconds, participants responded) and acceptance
tasa (how often participants indicated that the scene and sentence were compatible) eran
measured.
Análisis. Two mixed-effects regression models were fitted to the data: a linear model for the
reaction time data, and a logistic model for the acceptance rate data. The reaction time data
analysis was limited to trials in which participants accepted the scene/sentence pair.
The maximal random effects structure was used for both models: random intercepts and
slopes were included for all fixed-effects predictors, para los participantes, and for items. The models
were fitted using the lme4 package in R (Bates et al., 2015). Treatment coding was used in both
modelos, with the Plain Speaker condition as the baseline. This resulted in the following fixed-
effects contrasts: Perspectival, 1 for items in the Perspectival condition and 0 for items in the
Plain condition; Ambos, 1 for the Both condition and 0 de lo contrario; Listener, 1 for the Listener
condition and 0 de lo contrario; and None, 1 for the None condition and 0 de lo contrario.
Of critical importance for testing the predictions of the models under consideration is how
quickly participants can accept a perspectival verb as a valid description of the different scenes
relative to that scene’s Plain baseline. Treating the Speaker condition as the baseline allows us
to interpret the Perspective:Both interaction term as measuring this key comparison of interest,
since it takes into account the differences between reaction times for scene types in the Plain
versus the Perspectival condition. We therefore look at differences between each participant’s
average reaction times for the Plain condition and their average reaction times for the Perspec-
tival condition for each scene type.
Resultados. The predicted probabilities of each scene by sentence according to the speaker
anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models are shown in Figure 11. Crit-
icamente, the simultaneous integration model predicts highest probability for the Both scene when
the sentence uses come, while the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model predicts that the
Speaker and Both scenes will be equally likely.
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Cifra 11. Speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration model predictions for comprehension.
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Cifra 12. Experiments 1a–1c distribution of by-participant differences in RTs to non-perspectival verbs minus RTs to perspectival verbs.
Negative values indicate that perspectival verbs were accepted faster than their non-perspectival counterparts for a given scene; positive values
indicate that perspectival verbs were accepted more slowly than their non-perspectival counterparts. Hatch marks indicate individual values;
the vertical line indicates the distribution mean.
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Reaction Time Results. Cifra 12 shows the distribution of by-participant differences in reaction
times to each type of scene for Plain and Perspectival verbs. To calculate this, a participant’s
Perspectival RT was subtracted from their Plain RT by scene. Negative values of this difference
indicate that acceptance times for the Perspectival condition were faster than for its Plain
counterpart.
Reaction times in the Perspectival Both condition were faster than in the Plain Both condi-
ción. In all other conditions, reaction times were slower in the Perspectival condition than the
Plain condition. A reliable difference in reaction times for the Both and Speaker scenes is
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Mesa 1.
Experiment 1a RT mixed effects regression analysis, fixed effects (norte = 3630)
Fixed effects
Perspectival
Ambos
Listener
None
Perspectival:Ambos
Perspectival:Listener
Perspectival:None
^β
0.06(± 0.02)
0.03(± 0.02)
−0,03(± 0.02)
−0,08(± 0.02)
−0,06(± 0.03)
0.03(± 0.03)
0.05(± 0.03)
z
3.16
1.43
−1.28
−4.14
−2.22
1.05
1.65
pag
< 0.01
0.152
0.201
< 0.0001
< 0.05
0.295
0.101
supported by the mixed-effects model shown in Table 1, which finds a significant interaction
between Both and Perspectival.
Acceptance Rate Results. The acceptance rate results (Figure 13) were at ceiling in most condi-
tions, including in the critical conditions (Perspectival Speaker and Perspectival Both). This
means that the acceptance data cannot be interpreted in support of either model. Surprisingly,
the acceptance rates for the Perspectival None condition were also quite high: items in this
condition were accepted 83% of the time.
Discussion. The results of Experiment 1a provide qualified support for the existence of a Con-
vergent Perspective Boost, as predicted by the simultaneous integration model. Participants
were faster to accept scene-sentence pairs in the Perspectival Both condition than in the Per-
spectival Speaker condition, supporting the idea that listeners reason simultaneously over mul-
tiple perspectives. However, no evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost was observed in
the acceptance rate data. In both the Perspectival Speaker and Perspectival Both conditions,
participants’ acceptance rates were at ceiling (as they were in all Plain conditions).
Figure 13.
Experiment 1a participant mean acceptance rates by condition.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
The rate of acceptance of come in the None scenario was troublingly high, given that the
scene does not satisfy the perspectival requirement in the semantics of come. The high accep-
tance rates overall may indicate an experimental design issue. Responses to the debriefing
questions suggest that some participants may have hesitated about rejecting items where
the scene was valid for the truth-conditions of the sentence, but not the perspectival anchoring
of come. In addition, the experimental design may have biased participants towards positive
responses, given that 7 of the 8 conditions were predicted to be accepted, leading to inflated
acceptance rates across the board.
To address this limitation, we ran two replication studies with small modifications.
Experiments 1b and 1c
Experiments 1b and 1c are sentence/picture compatibility judgment tasks replicating Experi-
ment 1a. In Experiment 1b, additional fillers were introduced to encourage participants to
reject items. Participants were also given more explicit instructions about when to reject items.
Experiment 1c employs the same paradigm as Experiment 1b, but with a larger sample size. In
addition, in Experiment 1c, we recruited two balanced groups of participants by race to inves-
tigate the possibility that participants may be better able to access the Listener perspective if
the perceived race of the Listener character matches their own.
Methods
Participants. For Experiment 1b, 95 monolingual American English-speaking participants were
recruited through Prolific. Participants who achieved less than 90% accuracy on the spatial
control task were excluded from the experiment (n = 31). This left a total of 64 participants
in the final analysis.
For Experiment 1c, 223 participants were recruited in two groups. One group consisted of
monolingual American-English speaking participants who identified as Black, recruited
through Prolific. The other consisted of monolingual American-English speaking participants
who identified as white, also recruited through Prolific. Participants who achieved less than
90% accuracy on the spatial control task were excluded from the experiment (n = 95), leaving
128 participants divided evenly across the two groups. This rejection criterion, as well as the
experimental procedures and planned analyses described below, were preregistered through
the Open Science Foundation.10
Materials.
In both replications, the critical stimuli and fillers from Experiment 1a were used.
To address the positive response bias in Experiment 1a, both replications used additional
filler items that were designed to be grammatical, but pragmatically bad. 15 fillers were added:
5 definiteness violations, 3 presupposition violations, 3 scalar implicature cases, and 4 under-
specific number cases. Figure 14 shows an example definiteness violation filler: using the tea-
pot on the table in this context violates the definiteness presupposition of the because there are
two teapots on the table. The total number of items was therefore increased to 113.
Procedure. The procedure was largely identical to Experiment 1a. However, the instructions to
participants were modified in order to encourage them to reject pragmatically odd, but truth-
conditionally valid descriptions. Participants were instructed that Sam “sometimes says things
in a weird way or says things that don’t make sense,” and they were told that their task was to
10 https://osf.io/3bsnz/?view_only=1091b1607b864161860f84dcafe3e425.
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Figure 14. Pragmatically odd filler example: definiteness violation.
indicate whether or not what Sam says seemed “normal” according to the picture. This was
meant to prompt them to reject uses of come without a valid perspectival anchoring.
Participants were also given more training with pragmatically odd items, and more feed-
back about why those items should be rejected. They were shown 6 training items: 2 prag-
matic violations, 1 false description, and 3 valid descriptions, including a normal description
of an odd scene, to help them differentiate between unusual scenarios and unusual
descriptions.
Analysis. Mixed-effects models were fit to the reaction time data as described for Experiment 1a.
Results
Reaction Time Results.
Both condition, as in Experiment 1a (Figure 12).
In both replications, mean reaction times were fastest in the Perspectival
In Experiment 1b, the critical interaction between the Perspectival and Both conditions was
not significant (Table 2). In Experiment 1c, as in Experiment 1a, the interaction was significant
(Table 3).
Table 2.
Experiment 1b RT mixed effects regression analysis, fixed effects (n = 2581)
Fixed effects
Perspectival
Both
Listener
None
Perspectival:Both
Perspectival:Listener
Perspectival:None
^β
−0.03(±0.03)
0.005(±0.02)
−0.037(±0.03)
−0.12(±0.03)
−0.06(±0.03)
0.19(±0.04)
0.13(±0.05)
z
−1.1
0.2
−1.4
−5.1
−1.9
5.2
2.6
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
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0.28
0.85
0.15
< 0.0001
0.059
< 0.0001
0.01
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Table 3.
Experiment 1c RT mixed effects regression analysis, fixed effects (n = 3103)
Fixed effects
Perspectival
Both
Listener
None
Perspectival:Both
Perspectival:Listener
Perspectival:None
^β
−0.01(±0.02)
0.03(±0.02)
−0.004(±0.02)
−0.063(±0.02)
−0.087(±0.02)
0.16(±0.03)
0.08(±0.03)
z
−0.6
1.8
−1.2
−3.3
−3.5
5.4
2.5
p
0.53
0.08
0.82
0.001
< 0.001
< 0.0001
0.02
Acceptance Rate Results. The addition of the pragmatically odd fillers was effective at decreasing
the acceptance rate for Perspectival None items (Figure 15). However, in both replications, the
acceptance rates for the Speaker and Both conditions remained at ceiling. Mixed-effects logis-
tic regression models found no reliable differences between the rates of acceptance in the Per-
spectival Both and Perspectival Speaker conditions for either experiment (Tables 4 and 5).
In both replications, the rate of acceptance of Perspectival Listener items decreased sub-
stantially. Although both models predict that listeners should expect the speaker to be located
at the destination of motion (possibly in addition to the listener), each also predicts that
listener-oriented readings should be available when the speaker’s perspective is ruled out
by context, as in the Perspectival Listener condition. So although both models predict slower
reaction times in this condition (for different reasons), the low rate of acceptability in this con-
dition is surprising.
Combined Discussion
When considered together, 1a–1c provide support for the simultaneous integration account’s
prediction that listeners take into account multiple perspectives at once when interpreting
grammatically perspectival expressions. In all three comprehension experiments, we saw that
the reaction times were numerically fastest in the Perspectival Both condition; in two out of
Figure 15. Experiment 1b (left) and 1c (right) participant mean acceptance rates by condition.
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Table 4.
Experiment 1b acceptance mixed effects regression analysis, fixed effects (n = 2581)
Fixed effects
Perspectival
Both
Listener
None
Perspectival:Both
Perspectival:Listener
Perspectival:None
^β
0.71(±0.4)
1.1(±0.6)
−0.02(±0.3)
0.64(±0.4)
0.09(±0.7)
−3.5(±0.5)
−6.0(±0.6)
z
1.7
1.7
−0.06
1.5
0.13
−7.4
−10.7
p
0.09
0.08
0.96
0.1
0.9
< 0.0001
< 0.0001
three experiments RTs were significantly faster in the Perspectival Both condition than the
Perspectival Speaker condition. This pattern suggests a Convergent Perspective Boost, as
predicted by the simultaneous integration view. In contrast, the data do not seem to support
the Simple Speaker Advantage predicted by the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model.
There are two qualifications necessary to this conclusion. One is that the predicted
Convergent Perspective Boost was not observed in the acceptability measure: acceptance rates
were at ceiling in both conditions. The evidence for the Convergent Perspective Boost comes
entirely from the RT data: participants were fastest to accept the scene where both potential
perspective-holders were at the destination following Thelma is coming. The second is that we
did not observe a significant interaction in Experiment 1b. Given the relatively small sample
size of this experiment compared to the others, we believe that this is most likely due to low
power.
Finally, in Experiment 1c, two groups of participant were recruited in order to explore
whether participants find it easier to adopt the listener character’s perspective when they share
Table 5.
Experiment 1c acceptance mixed effects regression analysis, fixed effects (n = 3103)
Fixed effects
Perspectival
Both
Listener
None
Perspectival:Both
Perspectival:Listener
Perspectival:None
^β
0.9(±0.3)
0.8(±0.3)
0.4(±0.3)
0.7(±0.3)
0.5(±0.5)
−3.1(±0.5)
−5.2(±0.5)
z
3.0
2.7
1.7
2.5
0.96
−7.7
−10.98
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0.002
0.007
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0.01
0.34
< 0.0001
< 0.0001
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more demographic characteristics, since the experimental stimuli depicted a Black listener
character. An exploratory meta-analysis of the acceptance rates in Experiment 1a and 1b by
race suggested that Black participants considered the listener’s perspective more often: in a
post-hoc mixed-effects regression analysis, their Listener Perspectival acceptance rates were
reliably higher than other participants. However, though acceptance rates in the Perspectival
Listener condition were higher among Black participants, a post-hoc mixed-effects regression
analysis found no reliable between-group differences in either acceptance rates or reaction
times in Experiment 1c. Although we did not find a reliable effect of race, we feel that the
effect of shared demographic characteristics on grammatical perspective-taking is an interest-
ing direction for future work.
PERSPECTIVE SELECTION IN PRODUCTION
In production, the speaker must select a compatible perspective and utterance to communi-
cate their intended meaning. In this section, we illustrate two key differences in the production
predictions of the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models of
grammatical perspective-taking.
Speaker Anchoring-and-Adjustment Production Predictions
The production version of the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment posits that speakers always
use their own perspectives. Unlike in comprehension, there is no cue to prompt the selection
of a different perspective, since there is always an utterance compatible with the intended
meaning and the speaker’s perspective. If the speaker is at the destination of motion, they
can use come; if they are not, they can simply choose a different verb, like walk or go. The
production task is therefore less constrained than comprehension, since the speaker can
choose from a wide space of possible utterances.
Consequently, the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment production model predicts that
speakers will always use their own perspectives. They will produce come only when describ-
ing scenes where they are located at the destination of motion (Both, Speaker). This gives rise
to the same Simple Speaker Advantage outlined in comprehension: come is most likely to be
used to describe scenes where the speaker is at the destination. For scenes where the speaker
is not at the destination of motion, speakers are expected to produce go or walk rather than
come (Listener, Speaker Moving Listener, None, Speaker Moving None).
The speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model does not predict any difference in the
speaker’s behavior when describing scenes where Thelma is the mover compared to scenes
where the speaker is the mover.11 In both cases, they will use go or walk to describe scenes
where they are not located at the destination of motion rather than shifting to a perspective that
licenses come. So, the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model predicts that the speaker will
describe all scenes where they are the mover with go or walk, since the speaker cannot both
be in motion and located at the destination of motion simultaneously.
Simultaneous Integration Production Predictions
In the simultaneous integration model of production, speakers consider multiple perspectives
at once. They reason about the listener’s comprehension process in order to select the
utterance-perspective pair that best describes their intended meaning.
11 We assume here that the speaker uses the same perspective selection process in both cases; it could be that
the speaker’s production process is different when they are the mover, however.
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Because speakers consider multiple perspectives simultaneously, the utility of come is pre-
dicted to be highest when it describes a scene where all potential perspective-holders are at
the destination of motion. In this case, come is licensed for all perspectives that the listener
might take. If the speaker uses come to describe a scene where only one perspective-holder is
at the destination, they run the risk that the listener might select the wrong perspective, and
consequently, mis-interpret their utterance.
As a result, the simultaneous integration model predicts a Convergent Perspective Boost:
speakers should produce come most often when describing the Both scene. Speakers are also
predicted to produce come at a less frequent rate in the Speaker and Listener scenes; the rel-
ative frequency will vary with the strength of the penalty for non-speaker perspectives. The
speaker is not predicted to produce come in the None scene.
So far, these predictions parallel those of the comprehension model. However, in produc-
tion, the predictions of the simultaneous integration and speaker anchoring-and-adjustment
models differ in a second respect. The simultaneous integration model predicts a benefit from
decreased ambiguity when the speaker is the mover.
In the Speaker Moving Listener scene, the speaker is the mover, and therefore, cannot serve
as the perspective-holder for come. This means that the ambiguity over perspective-holders for
come is eliminated in this scene: the perspective-holder must be the listener. Because the
simultaneous integration model incorporates reasoning over the listener’s interpretation pro-
cess, it consequently assigns high utility to come as a description of the Speaker Moving Lis-
tener scene compared to the Listener scene.
We refer to this as the Ambiguity Elimination Advantage: the simultaneous integration
model predicts more frequent use of come in scenes where there are fewer potential
perspective-holders for listeners to consider. By contrast, the speaker anchoring-and-
adjustment model predicts no difference between the Listener and Speaker Moving Listener
scenes: in both cases, come is not predicted to be produced, since it would require adopting
a non-speaker perspective.
Summary
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In production, the predictions of the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous
integration models differ in two key ways. First, as in comprehension, the simultaneous inte-
gration production model predicts a Convergent Perspective Boost (come will be produced
most when describing the Both scene), while the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model
predicts a Simple Speaker Advantage (come will be produced equally often when describing
the Speaker and Both scenes). The most likely contexts for speakers to produce Thelma is
coming when Thelma is the character in motion under each model are depicted in
Figure 16.
One interpretative difficulty is that if the cost of non-speaker perspectives is high, the
Convergent Perspective Boost may be too small to be observed. If the distribution over
perspectives is highly skewed towards the speaker or the cost for non-speaker perspectives
is sufficiently high, the listener’s perspective will be sampled so infrequently that the perspec-
tive set will appear to contain only the speaker’s perspective. Consequently, if come is used
more in the Both condition, the evidence supports the simultaneous integration model, but if
come is used equally in the two conditions, the evidence is compatible with either a speaker
anchoring-and-adjustment model or a simultaneous integration model with a high perspec-
tive cost.
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Figure 16. Ranked likelihood of uttering come in each scene as ranked by Convergent Perspec-
tive Boost versus Simple Speaker Advantage.
However, the predictions of the two models also differ for a second scenario: when the
speaker is the character in motion. The simultaneous integration model predicts a difference
between the rates of come production in the Listener and Speaker Moving Listener scenes:
under the Ambiguity Elimination Advantage, come should be produced more often in the latter
condition. The speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model predicts that come should not be
used to describe either scene, since this would mean adopting a non-speaker perspective.
The predicted likelihood of speakers producing an utterance containing come according to
each model in the Listener condition and two Speaker Moving conditions are depicted in
Figure 17. The key difference between the model predictions for contexts in which the speaker
is the mover does not disappear when the cost of non-speaker perspectives is very high in the
simultaneous integration model, since there should still be an observable Ambiguity Elimina-
tion Advantage in the Speaker Moving Listener condition.
PRODUCTION EXPERIMENTS
In this section, we describe the results of two production experiments that compare the pre-
dictions of the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models of
grammatical perspective-taking. In production, the speaker’s task is to select the utterance
and perspective that best communicate their intended meaning.
As in the comprehension experiments, we use illustrated scenes to depict observed worlds
(meanings). In both experiments, participants were shown a scene and asked to complete an
utterance naturally in the given context. We interpret the rate at which participants produce
come, go, and manner-of-motion verbs in each condition as a measure of the marginal pos-
terior probability of the utterance given the depicted world.
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Figure 17. Ranked likelihood of uttering come in each scene as ranked by Ambiguity Elimination
Advantage versus Simple Speaker Advantage.
Experiment 2a
Experiment 2a is a speech bubble completion task that tests the existence of a Convergent
Perspective Boost in production. Critically, we asked whether there were more productions
of come for Both scenes than for Speaker scenes, as predicted by the simultaneous integration
model, or whether speakers produced come at a similar rate for Both and Speaker scenes, as
predicted by the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model. The experimental procedures
and planned analyses described below were preregistered through the Open Science
Foundation.12
Methods
Participants. 42 Monolingual American English-speaking participants were recruited through
Prolific. One participant was excluded after giving incoherent answers to bot-check questions,
and another was excluded because they reported mixing up the speaker and listener charac-
ters. This exclusion was not preregistered, as it was unforeseen.
Materials. Experiment 2a employed a 4 × 1 within-participants design with the same 4 scene
types from the comprehension experiments: Both, Speaker, Listener, and None.
The scene stimuli were modified slightly for the production experiments. In the production
paradigm, the speech bubble in each scene showed only the beginning of a sentence (Thelma
is …), which participants were asked to complete. To encourage participants to focus on the
motion event, the scenes were edited to show the same manner of motion (walking). Figure 18
shows an example Listener scene.
12 https://osf.io/3bsnz/?view_only=1091b1607b864161860f84dcafe3e425.
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Figure 18.
Experiment 2a example stimulus in the Listener condition.
The filler and spatial control items from Experiment 1a were used as fillers for both produc-
tion experiments, modified in the same way as the main condition items. Unlike in the com-
prehension experiments, the spatial control items were not used to exclude participants, due to
the difficulty of prompting them to describe the critical contrast between the speaker’s visual
perspective and their own.
In the production study, participants were asked to imagine themselves as the
Procedure.
speaker character, Sam. Unlike in the comprehension studies, where participants saw the sen-
tence before the scene, in the production study, participants saw the scene with a partially
completed sentence within the speech bubble (Figure 18). Participants were asked to type a
completion for the sentence in a text box. They were told to complete the speaker’s sentence
as naturally as possible, and to only mention what was shown in the scene. In the main con-
ditions, the sentence prompt was “Thelma is ….” In the filler and spatial control items, the
prompt varied based on the scene.
Participants saw 12 items in each of the 4 scene conditions (Both, Speaker, Listener, None).
Stimuli were displayed and responses collected using the Ibex Farm platform for web-based
experiments (Drummond, 2019). Each experimental session began with an informed consent
form and concluded with a demographic survey and a debriefing survey, which allowed par-
ticipants to report any issues with the survey and contained two free-response bot-check
questions.
Data Coding. Participant responses were coded for 11 categories, as shown in Figure 19.
Categories were not exclusive: a response might contain both an instance of come and another
verb. There were two annotators: one of the authors and an annotator who was unaware of the
purpose of the experiment. The inter-annotator agreement scores for each category ranged
from 0.89–1 (Cohen’s κ).
Figure 19.
Experiment 2a data coding categories.
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
The primary dependent variables of interest are the rates of come, go, and manner-of-
motion verbs. The tense, mood, subject, and destination categories were used to identify in-
progress motion descriptions. Responses that were questions or did not describe an ongoing
event were excluded.13 For instance, the response shown in (7) was excluded: although it
contains a motion verb, it is within a question.
7. Thelma is … coming to the pet store? Nice.
Across both production experiments, around 11% of responses were excluded because
they did not describe an ongoing event. This rate was roughly constant across conditions.
Motion descriptions with destinations or subjects other than the one depicted in the scene
were also excluded; these were assumed to result from misinterpretations of the scene. Around
20% of responses were excluded because they mentioned the wrong destination or no desti-
nation. This exclusion rate was roughly equal across conditions, though lower in the None
condition (10%). No responses mentioned the wrong subject.
The go category includes only uses of go as a motion verb. Across Experiments 2a and 2b,
33 out of the 1448 responses containing a lemma of go were excluded because they did not
meet this criteria. About half of these were in the phrase going shopping. Most of the rest were
future auxiliary uses of go.14
Analysis. The rate of come responses was analyzed using a mixed effects logistic regression
model. The model used four fixed-effects predictors, corresponding to the four scenes: Both,
Speaker, Listener, None. The maximal random effects structure was used: random intercepts
and slopes were included for all fixed-effects predictors, for participants, and for items. The
model was fit to the coded data using the lme4 package in R (Bates et al., 2015), and all pair-
wise comparisons were extracted from the resulting model using the multcomp package
(Hothorn et al., 2008).15
Results. Figure 20 displays the raw responses for the three main categories of interest along
with the predictions generated by the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous
integration models.
The simultaneous integration model predicts that come will be produced most frequently in
the Both condition, followed by the Speaker condition. It predicts the opposite pattern for go: it
is most likely in the None condition, followed by the Listener condition, and then the Speaker
condition (based on the strength of the speaker bias). The speaker anchoring-and-adjustment
model predicts that come will be produced equally often in the Speaker and Both conditions.
For go, it predicts equally frequent use in the Listener and None conditions, and no use in the
Both and Speaker conditions.
13 This is important because many perspectival expressions are known to undergo interrogative flip: in ques-
tions, the default perspective-holder shifts from the speaker to the listener (Faller, 2002).
14 Our data coders used the following rule of thumb to determine light verb uses of go: “Substitute in walk for go
and see whether the resulting sentence makes sense. For instance, Thelma is going to come to the store fails this
test because Thelma is walking to come to the store is odd, while Thelma is going to get coffee passes because
Thelma is walking to get coffee makes sense.” This errs on the side of including ambiguous future auxiliary uses
of go as actual motion events, since Thelma is going to get coffee could describe either a current or future event
(Thelma is going to get coffee with Margaret next week).
15 We preregistered a model that used treatment coding with the Speaker condition as the baseline. We
switched to this model because the low rate of come responses in the Listener condition motivated a model
that could compare the Listener and None conditions. The reliable effects are the same under both.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
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Figure 20. Main condition production predictions and results.
We note that we expect the rates of production for come and go to be lower than predicted
by the model, since our model considers only one manner-of-motion verb, while production
participants were unconstrained in their choice of motion description.
Table 6 shows the proportion of come, go, and manner-of-motion verbs used in participant
responses that described the motion event (1428 of the original 1872 responses).
Participants used come most frequently to describe the Speaker scene, followed by the Both
scene. A high rate of manner-of-motion completions was found across conditions, with the
highest rate in the Listener condition (71%). The proportion of Listener completions using
come was very low (4%).
The None condition was the only one in which manner-of-motion completions were not
used more frequently than either perspectival verb. In the None condition, go was strongly
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Table 6.
counts
Condition
Both
Speaker
Listener
None
Experiment 2a proportion of motion responses by condition and type, along with raw
come
27%
30%
4%
0.8%
go
10%
13%
27%
59%
walk etc
63%
n motion responses
335
58%
69%
40%
359
353
381
preferred, as both models predict. The proportion of None condition responses involving come
was very small, as expected.
The pattern of go use roughly follows the predictions of the Simultaneous Integration
model: it is highest in the None condition, followed by the Listener, and then the Speaker
conditions. Contrary to the predictions of both models, however, it was used sometimes in
the Both condition.
Although the proportion of come responses was numerically higher in the Speaker condition
than the Both condition, this difference was not reliable in the mixed-effects model (Table 7).
Despite the low rate of come responses in the Listener condition, the mixed effects model found
a reliable difference in the rate of come responses in the None and Listener conditions (Table 8).
Post-hoc Spatial Controls Analysis. A main concern about the validity of our experiment is that
participants may not be successfully adopting the perspective of the character that they are
instructed to take on. In the comprehension experiments, we use the spatial control task to exclude
participants who did not demonstrate the ability to adopt Lucy’s perspective. In the production
experiments, we did not use the spatial controls as an exclusion mechanism, because participants
had freedom over what part of the scene to describe; many participants did not describe the aspect
with the critical contrast between the speaker character’s visual perspective and their own.
To explore whether the ability of participants to take on the speaker’s perspective poses a
threat to the external validity of our task, a post-hoc analysis of the spatial control items was
performed, as described in Appendix A. For the Between and Close conditions, 89% of the
responses were true according to the speaker’s perspective and not the visual perspective of
the participant. 0.5% were true according the visual perspective of the participant and not the
speaker character. This suggests that in the majority of trials, participants were adopting the
speaker character’s perspective rather than relying on their own.
Discussion. The main finding of interest in Experiment 2a is that speakers did not produce
come more often when describing the Both scene than the Speaker scene; in fact, a numerical
Table 7.
Experiment 2a come response mixed effects logistic regression analysis
Fixed effects (n = 1872)
(Intercept)
Both
Listener
None
^β
−1.66(±0.26)
−0.37(±0.26)
−4.03(±0.6)
−15.5(±4.1)
z
−6.4
−1.5
−6.7
−3.8
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
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< 0.0001
0.15
< 0.0001
0.0002
64
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Table 8.
Pairwise comparisons between Scene conditions in mixed effects logistic regression analysis
Linear hypothesis
Both-Speaker==0
Listener-Speaker==0
None-Speaker==0
Listener-Both==0
None-Both==0
None-Listener==0
^β
−0.37(±0.3)
−4.03(±0.6)
−15.48(±4.1)
−3.65(±0.6)
−15.11(±4.1)
−11.45(±4.1)
z
−1.5
−6.7
−3.8
−5.7
−3.7
−2.8
p
0.4
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
0.0178
trend was observed in the opposite direction. Unlike the comprehension experiments, this
experiment found no evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost ; instead, the data are more
consistent with a Simple Speaker Advantage. Although the raw percentages of come and go in
the production data are not expected to match up with the comprehension measures, since the
production task is more open-ended, this is evidence of an asymmetry between the compre-
hension results and the production results.
We note, however, that two facts may complicate the interpretation of the data. The lack of
a Convergent Perspective Boost and a low rate of come responses in the Listener condition
together could suggest a strong egocentric bias. A strong bias towards sepaker perspectives
complicates the interpretation of the lack of a Convergent Perspective Boost, since as the cost
of non-speaker perspectives increases in the simultaneous integration model, the predicted
Convergent Perspective Boost decreases. It is also possible that our sample size was too small
to observe a Convergent Perspective Boost. Unlike in the comprehension task, participants
were not constrained to consider only motion verbs, so the observed rate of responses that
include perspectival motion verbs was fairly low in all conditions.
Experiment 2b
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Experiment 2b is a replication and extension of Experiment 2a. It tests two predicted differ-
ences between the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models
of production: the existence of a Convergent Perspective Boost, and the existence of a Ambi-
guity Elimination Advantage.
Experiment 2a found no evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost. However, as noted
above, as the strength of egocentric bias increases, the Convergent Perspective Boost is pre-
dicted to decrease. Therefore, in this experiment, we also test a second difference between
the predictions of the simultaneous integration and speaker anchoring-and-adjustment models:
whether a reduction in perspective-holder ambiguity affects how frequently speakers use come.
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Methods
Participants. 63 monolingual American English-speaking participants were recruited through Pro-
lific. 7 participants were excluded because they gave incoherent answers to the bot-check ques-
tions, leaving 56 participants. This rejection criterion, as well as the experimental procedures and
planned analyses described below, were preregistered through the Open Science Foundation.16
16 https://osf.io/3bsnz/?view_only=1091b1607b864161860f84dcafe3e425.
OPEN MIND: Discoveries in Cognitive Science
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Grammatical Perspective-Taking Anderson and Dillon
Figure 21. Speaker Moving scenes.
Materials. Two new scene conditions were added to the stimuli from Experiment 2a: a Speaker
Moving Listener condition and a Speaker Moving None condition. These scenes show the
speaker as the person in motion, and manipulate whether the listener is at the destination
of motion (Figure 21).
Procedure. Experiment 2b uses the same procedure as Experiment 2a, but extends the para-
digm with two new scene conditions, for a total of 6 conditions: Both, Speaker, Listener, None,
Speaker Moving Listener, and Speaker Moving None. Each participant saw 10 items in each
condition, presented using a Latin Square design.
Data Coding. The data coding procedure described for Experiment 2a was followed. The data
was coded by an author and an annotator who was unaware of the purpose the experiment.
Inter-annotator agreement scores ranged from 0.99 to 1.0 by condition.
Analysis. A mixed-effects regression model was fit to the coded data as described for Exper-
iment 2a, but with the two new Speaker Moving conditions added as fixed-effects, coded as
follows: Speaker Moving Listener, 1 for the Speaker Moving Listener condition and 0 other-
wise; and Speaker Moving None, 1 for the Speaker Moving None condition and 0 otherwise.
Results. Table 9 shows the proportion of come, go, and manner-of-motion verbs used in
descriptions of the motion event (2899 of the 3360 original responses). Raw responses are
plotted in Figure 20.
Overall, the results are similar to Experiment 2a. Though the proportion of come responses
was higher in the Both condition than the Speaker condition, the difference was not significant
in the mixed-effects model (Table 10). Thus, as in Experiment 2a, this experiment failed to find
evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost.
Table 9.
Experiment 2b proportion of motion responses by condition and type
Mover
Thelma
Scene
Both
Speaker
Listener
None
come
34%
32%
6%
1%
Speaker
Listener
14%
None
0.2%
go
17%
25%
40%
54%
22%
53%
walk etc
49%
n motion responses
468
43%
54%
45%
64%
47%
450
489
522
466
504
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Table 10.
Experiment 2b come response mixed effects logistic regression analysis
Fixed effects (n = 3360)
(Intercept)
Both
Listener
None
Speaker Moving Listener
Speaker Moving None
^β
−1.62(±0.3)
0.12(±0.18)
−3.37(±0.4)
−7.4(±1.3)
−1.3(±0.2)
−7.7(±2.1)
z
−6.0
0.7
−7.7
−5.6
−6.0
−3.7
p
< 0.0001
0.50
< 0.0001
< 0.0001
< 0.0001
0.0002
Figure 22 shows the raw responses in the new Speaker Moving conditions, along with the
predictions of the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment and simultaneous integration models.
Participants produced come more frequently in the Speaker Moving Listener condition than
in the Listener condition. The mixed-effects model finds a reliable difference between these
two conditions (Table 11). This supports the existence of a Ambiguity Elimination Advantage,
as predicted by the simultaneous integration model.
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Figure 22.
Speaker Moving production predictions and results.
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Table 11.
analysis
Pairwise comparisons between Scene conditions in mixed effects logistic regression
Linear hypothesis
Both-Speaker==0
Listener-Speaker==0
None-Speaker==0
Speaker Moving Listener-Speaker==0
Speaker Moving None-Speaker==0
Listener-Both==0
None-Both==0
Speaker Moving Listener-Both==0
Speaker Moving None-Both==0
None-Listener==0
Speaker Moving Listener-Listener==0
Speaker Moving None-Listener==0
Speaker Moving Listener-None==0
Speaker Moving None-None==0
Speaker Moving None-Speaker Moving Listener==0
^β
0.12(±0.2)
−3.37(±0.4)
−7.42(±1.3)
−1.26(±0.2)
−7.7(±2.1)
−3.49(±0.4)
−7.5(±1.3)
−1.38(±0.2)
−7.8(±2.1)
−4.04(±1.4)
2.11(±0.5)
−4.32(±2.1)
6.16(±1.3)
−0.27(±2.5)
−6.43(±2.1)
z
0.7
−7.7
−5.6
−6.0
−3.7
−7.9
−5.7
−6.1
−3.6
−2.9
4.6
−2.0
4.6
−0.1
−3.1
p
1.0
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
0.002
< 0.001
< 0.001
< 0.001
0.002
0.028
< 0.001
0.25
0.001
1.0
0.016
Post-hoc Spatial Controls Analysis. A post-hoc analysis of the spatial control items was performed
as for Experiment 2a. Details can be found in Appendix A. For the Between and Close con-
ditions, 88% of the responses were true according to the speaker’s perspective and not the
visual perspective of the participant. 0.2% were true according the visual perspective of the
participant and not that of the speaker character. We take this as evidence that participants
were, on the whole, able to adopt the spatial perspective of the speaker character throughout
the experiment.
Combined Discussion
The production results suggest that speakers rely strongly on their own perspectives. No Con-
vergent Perspective Boost was observed: the rate of come production in the Both condition
was indistinguishable from the Speaker condition. Moreover, the low frequency of come in
the Listener condition suggests that speakers strongly prefer their own perspectives to the
listener’s.
The strength of the observed egocentric bias is consistent with the speaker anchoring-and-
adjustment model of perspective selection, though, as noted above, it is also consistent with
the simultaneous integration model under certain assumptions.
The results from the new conditions in Experiment 2b are easier to interpret: they support
the simultaneous integration model. Speakers used come more often in the Speaker Moving
Listener condition than in the Listener condition. This matches the simultaneous integration
model’s prediction of an Ambiguity Elimination Advantage: come has higher utility when there
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are fewer potential perspective-holders for it. This finding is difficult to explain in the speaker
anchoring-and-adjustment model, which expects speakers to maintain their own perspectives
and use go or walk.
How can we reconcile these findings? We might imagine a rule-based system that augments
the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model with a preference to use come when possible.
However, this variant of the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model cannot explain the
observed Ambiguity Elimination Advantage, since both the Listener scene and the Speaker
Moving Listener scene can be felicitously described with come.
Thus, the production results provide conflicting evidence about grammatical perspective-
taking in production. On the one hand, the signature prediction of the simultaneous integra-
tion model, the Convergent Perspective Boost, was not observed. On the other hand, the
observed Ambiguity Elimination Advantage, which falls out naturally from the simultaneous
integration model, is difficult to explain in the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model.
While our work was under review, our production findings were replicated and extended
by Watson et al. (2021). They report results from a web-based experiment with a larger sample
size (n = 84) that measured motion verb production in the same conditions we explore in
Experiment 2a (Both, Speaker, Listener, None). Unlike our production data, their data supports
the existence of a Convergent Perspective Boost: their participants used come in the Both con-
dition 20% of the time, compared to 13% in the Speaker condition. For other conditions, their
data shows similar trends to ours.
The results from Watson et al. (2021) lend evidence in support of a simultaneous integra-
tion model of grammatical perspective-taking in production. However, they also raise the
question of why a Convergent Perspective Boost was observed in their experiment, but not
in ours. The difference in sample size is unlikely to account for it, since a meta-analysis com-
bining the data from Experiments 2a and 2b (n = 96) does not change the patterns we report
above. However, there may be other experimental design differences at play. The Watson
et al. (2021) paradigm use maps that display the character’s motion path, rather than our
two-location images. They also use automated text analysis tools rather than manual annota-
tion to code their data.
One shared limitation of our work and Watson et al. (2021) is the use of a web-based
design. Unlike much of the work on reference perspective-taking, these production tasks
ask participants to imagine themselves as conversation participants, rather than interacting
with an actual partner. Although our analysis of the spatial control items suggests that par-
ticipants were able to adopt the perspective of their assigned character in the studies despite
the web-based paradigm, it might make it harder for participants to access their (imagined)
partner’s perspective.17 In an in-person experimental paradigm, we might therefore expect
higher rates of perspective shift than found in our web-based experiments and those of
Watson et al. (2021). This is an important avenue for future work.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
In Modeling Grammatical Perspective-Taking section, we outlined two models of grammatical
perspective-taking: the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, which posits a serial
17 Hawkins et al. (2021)’s web-based reference perspective-taking work finds lower rates of egocentricity than
Heller et al. (2016)’s lab-based work, but perhaps this counter-intuitive discrepancy is explained by other task
factors.
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process with a strong bias towards speaker perspectives, and the simultaneous integration
model, which posits that conversation participants consider multiple perspectives at once.
The comprehension experiments tested a key difference in the model predictions. The
simultaneous integration model predicts a Convergent Perspective Boost: given a sentence
with a perspectival expression, the listener should assign higher probability to scenes in which
the sentence can be felicitously interpreted according to multiple perspectives. The speaker
anchoring-and-adjustment model, on the other hand, predicts a Simple Speaker Advantage:
all scenes where the utterance is compatible with the speaker’s perspective should be equally
likely.
Taken together, the three comprehension experiments provided evidence of a Convergent
Perspective Boost: comprehenders were faster to accept scenes where the speaker and listener
were both located at the destination when interpreting an utterance with the perspectival
motion verb come. This supports a simultaneous integration view of grammatical
perspective-taking in comprehension.
The production experiments tested two predictions of the simultaneous integration model:
the Convergent Perspective Boost and the Ambiguity Elimination Advantage. According to the
Ambiguity Elimination Advantage, speakers should use perspectival expressions more often
when ambiguity over the perspective-holder is reduced. This follows from the way that the
simultaneous integration model incorporates reasoning over the listener’s interpretive process.
By contrast, the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model expects the listener to always select
the same perspective as the speaker (the speaker’s perspective), and does not predict an
advantage for eliminating perspective ambiguity.
The production results were mixed. No evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost was
observed, contrary to the simultaneous integration model’s prediction. However, an Ambiguity
Elimination Advantage effect was observed in Experiment 2b, which cannot be easily
explained by the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model. In addition, a subsequent produc-
tion experiment by Watson et al. (2021) using a similar web-based paradigm as ours did find
evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost in production.
A key finding from the experiments presented above is an apparent asymmetry between
grammatical perspective-taking in production and comprehension. Although the response
measures in the two experiments are not directly comparable, since production participants
were free to generate a wider range of responses than comprehension participants saw, there
appears to be an asymmetry between the comprehension and production results: the compre-
hension results supported the existence of a Convergent Perspective Boost, while the produc-
tion results did not.
We see two directions to explore with the aim of reconciling these findings. The first is to
adopt the simultaneous integration model for comprehension, and the speaker anchoring-and-
adjustment model for production. This is compatible with the two-stage system proposed by
Harris (2012): perhaps both systems are in principle available for speakers and listeners, but
listeners are more motivated to use the costlier reasoning system than speakers. The second is
to reconcile the production results into a simultaneous integration model.
We argue in favor of the second approach, with some reservations, for two reasons. First, a
speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model cannot fully account of the patterns we observe in
production. If speakers are relying on a simpler heuristic-based grammatical perspective-
taking system, then we should not observe an Ambiguity Elimination Advantage in produc-
tion, since this arises only from reasoning over multiple available perspectives. Although
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Experiment 2b did not reveal evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost, speakers used
come significantly more often in the Speaker Moving Listener condition than the Listener con-
dition, which cannot be easily explained by a model that uses a simple speaker-default
heuristic.
Second, as noted in Production Experiments section, with a high perspective cost, the pre-
dicted Convergent Perspective Boost becomes very small, making it hard to distinguish
between the simultaneous integration and speaker anchoring-and-adjustment models. More-
over, subsequent work has found evidence of a Convergent Perspective Boost in production.
Although it is unclear why Watson et al. (2021) and our findings diverge, they do find a Con-
vergent Perspective Boost in a fairly similar experimental paradigm, which suggests that
speakers are reasoning over multiple perspectives simultaneously in some contexts. This is,
again, compatible with a two-stage system like the one sketched in Harris (2012), since it
could be that speakers are more motivated to use the costlier reasoning system in Watson
et al. (2021)’s experimental paradigm than they are in ours. However, if this is so, it is impor-
tant to understand why our contexts differ.
The question of what is driving the key difference between our results and Watson et al.
(2021)’s findings is a serious one. The fact that relatively minor differences in our paradigms
(the use of maps versus scenes, the inclusion of an Uncertainty manipulation, differences in
data coding) have led to such different findings is troubling, and highlights the need for more
work on grammatical perspective-taking in a wider range of contexts and with different exper-
imental paradigms. Replicating our work in a dyadic, in-person context would be a particu-
larly important next step towards reconciling our findings.
Our finding of an Ambiguity Elimination Advantage effect in Experiment 2b in tandem with
the fact that Watson et al. (2021)’s subsequent work finds evidence of Convergent Perspective
Boost in production leads us to adopt the simultaneous integration model for both comprehen-
sion and production. However, the observed asymmetry in our data remains to some extent:
our production participants use their own perspectives more frequently than our comprehen-
sion participants appear to expect them to. What should we make of this?
One possibility is that it is an artifact of whatever experimental design choices lead our
production findings to differ from those in Watson et al. (2021). Since Watson et al. (2021)
do not include a comprehension task, we cannot determine whether the differences between
our experimental stimuli would have also had an impact on listener behavior. This makes it
hard to know whether the asymmetry we observe would remain even if we observed a Con-
vergent Perspective Boost in production as in Watson et al. (2021). Do speakers demonstrate a
heavier bias towards their own perspectives than listeners expect them to?
If there is, in fact, an asymmetry in how speaker-biased speakers and listeners are, it could
be accounted for under a symmetrical model like the PRSA simultaneous integration model, in
tandem with an asymmetric cognitive bias. We find that speakers are strongly biased towards
their own perspectives, while listeners display a weaker bias towards the speaker’s perspec-
tive. Perhaps this results from egocentric bias in both directions: speakers are strongly biased
towards their perspectives, while listeners have a weaker self-perspective bias. In this case, the
underlying model would need to include a moderate speaker bias that is strengthened in pro-
duction by the speaker’s egocentric bias and weakened in comprehension by the listener’s
egocentric bias.
The asymmetry between speaker and listener behavior that we observe is paralleled in
other domains. Ryskin et al. (2020) find that in reference perspective-taking, speakers consider
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the Common Ground perspective less than listeners do. Kehler and Rohde (2013, 2019) sim-
ilarly find an asymmetry in pronoun production and comprehension, where listener expecta-
tions about which individuals will be pronominalized do not match speaker behavior.
These asymmetries are puzzling on a strongly Bayesian view of comprehension and pro-
duction, where speakers and listeners base their behavior on mental models of each others’
behavior that they are constantly updating. In this view, we would expect speaker and listener
estimates of each others’ egocentric biases to converge, and any discrepancies in their expec-
tations about each others’ behavior to gradually disappear. This is true regardless of how the
egocentric bias is interpreted: if it applies to listeners as well as speakers, over time, speakers
should adapt their production model accordingly, and vice versus.
Kehler and Rohde (2019) lay out one promising path towards reconciling the Bayesian view
with the observed production/comprehension asymmetries across domains. They propose for
pronominalization that listeners have access to additional evidence in pronoun resolution
beyond what speakers use in pronoun production. In their model, pronoun production is
primarily driven by grammatical or structural information such as topicality and subjecthood
(in line with centering views of pronominalization; Grosz et al., 1995). Pronoun comprehen-
sion, meanwhile, takes into account additional semantic and pragmatic factors like verb type
and discourse coherence (in line with coherence views of pronominalization; Hobbs, 1979).
If subsequent work confirms the existence of an asymmetry between grammatical
perspective-taking in production and comprehension, this would be one avenue to explore.
Many of the factors proposed to influence pronominalization and pronoun resolution are also
known to affect perspective prominence (Abrusán, 2021; Bimpikou, 2020; Hinterwimmer,
2019; Kaiser, 2018; Kaiser & Lee, 2017a, 2017b).18 Thus, Kehler and Rohde (2019)’s findings
for pronominalization might generalize to grammatical perspective-taking and explain the
production/comprehension asymmetry that we observed: speakers do not include the same
kinds of evidence in their perspective selection process as listeners consider in perspective
inference.
In the remainder of this section, we discuss the comprehension and production findings
together in the broader context of perspective-taking.
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Egocentricity in Grammatical Perspective-Taking
One finding that emerges from the combined comprehension and production results is a strong
bias towards the speaker’s perspective. In both comprehension and production, the listener’s
perspective is much less accessible than the speaker’s. In comprehension, the acceptance rate
of the Listener scene was around 60–65%, suggesting that about a third of the time, partici-
pants did not consider that the speaker might have adopted the listener’s perspective. In pro-
duction, participants produced come in the Listener scene around 5% of the time.
Both models that we consider can account for this speaker bias, though in different ways. It
falls out naturally from the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, since the speaker’s
perspective is always used if compatible. In the simultaneous integration model, these results
are accounted for by setting a high penalty for non-speaker perspectives in the perspective
cost function.
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18 In fact, in the perspective-anaphoric analysis of come that we use, following Barlew (2017), perspective
inference is a kind of pronoun resolution.
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The source of the speaker bias remains an open question. Some treatments of grammati-
cally perspectival expressions have stipulated a speaker-orientation in the semantics of the
expressions themselves, and accounted for other uses by some grammatical mechanism (such
as context-shifting) (Potts, 2005; Sudo, 2018). However, this is problematic for come, which
allows listener-oriented interpretations in a wide variety of grammatical environments.
Alternatively, speaker bias might arise as a result of a general cognitive bias towards self
perspectives. This is plausible given that such egocentric bias has been observed in
perspective-taking in reference contexts where there are no lexically perspectival expressions.
Our results provide only partial support for a more general bias. It is unclear why this bias
would apply more strongly in production than in comprehension, since our comprehension
participants were also biased towards the speaker’s perspective, rather than towards their own.
Past work on egocentric bias in the reference perspective-taking domain finds that listeners are
accordingly biased to their own perspectives (Epley, Keysar, et al., 2004). Yet we observe a
strong preference for speaker perspectives in comprehension as well, where a self bias should
lead to a preference for the listener’s perspective, rather than the speaker’s. Our comprehen-
sion results are more compatible with a view in which egocentricity is a speaker bias that
listeners are aware of and incorporate into their mental model of the speaker.
Perspective-Taking in Conversation
Our findings align well with the emerging picture of perspective-taking in reference. However,
we observe some key differences between the two perspective-taking domains. As in work on
perspective-taking when producing referring expressions, we find evidence of a bias towards
the speaker’s perspective. However, our production results suggest a much stronger bias than
has been observed in recent work on reference perspective-taking. In the production data pre-
sented by Hawkins et al. (2021), speakers almost always take into account the listener’s per-
spective. Ryskin et al. (2020)’s re-analysis of the data from Mozuraitis et al. (2018) suggests a
moderate egocentric bias, more in line with what we observe.19 However, their re-analysis of
the comprehension data from Heller et al. (2016) suggests an egocentric bias on the part of the
listener towards their own perspective, which we do not observe in our comprehension results.
It is important to keep in mind the differences between the two domains of perspective-
taking, and the experimental paradigms that have been employed to investigate them. Refer-
ence perspective-taking is not an all-or-nothing proposition: the speaker and the listener’s
shared information can be represented as a Common Ground perspective. The egocentric
biases quantified in Ryskin et al. (2020) represent failures to take into account the information
asymmetry between the conversation partners. In grammatical perspective-taking, there is no
such Common Ground perspective: there is a grammatical element that must be resolved to a
single perspective-holder in the discourse context.
The motivation to shift perspective also varies with the experimental paradigm. In the ref-
erence perspective-taking paradigm, the speaker knows that failure to consider the listener’s
perspective (information state) is likely to lead to a miscommunication. Failing to take the
listener’s perspective in our production experiment, on the other hand, is less likely to cause
confusion, since the speaker has other strategies of clarification available: they can use a
manner-of-motion verb to avoid perspectival reasoning altogether, or specify extra information
19 Though, given the differences in the experimental paradigms, it is difficult to compare their estimates directly
with ours.
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about the scene. Moreover, our experiment did not incorporate an explicit failure signal (like
selection of the wrong object).
Our web-base paradigm likely provided less motivation to participants to consider their
conversation partner’s perspective than an in-person experiment with a physically present
participant would; this remains an important area for future work.
Despite the key differences discussed above, there are two shared patterns of interest in our
findings for grammatical perspective-taking and recent findings for reference perspective-
taking: the asymmetry between comprehension and production discussed above, and inter-
speaker variability in perspective access.
Interspeaker Variability
In their work on perspective-taking in reference, Ryskin et al. (2020) find a high degree of
variability in the degree of egocentricity for different production participants. A sizeable group
of participants (∼25) almost never took into account their listeners’ perspectives. A smaller
group (∼7) almost always took their listeners’ perspectives. The egocentric biases of the
remaining participants (∼100) were spread between these two extremes.
We also observe a fair amount of variability in the accessibility of the speaker perspective in
both production and comprehension. Although a large group of participants in the compre-
hension experiments accept all listener scenes with come (∼127), a small group never accept
them (∼21), and the rest of the participants accept them with some frequency (∼125). The
production results are generally more variable given the less constrained nature of the task.
This finding aligns with other experimental work on grammatical perspective, which sug-
gests that the rate of access to non-speaker perspectives is highly variable across participants
(Anderson, 2019; Bimpikou, 2020; Duff, 2018).
Threats to Validity
The differences between our findings and those in the reference perspective-taking domain
may also be due to differences in our experimental paradigms. An advantage of Mozuraitis
et al. (2018)’s experimental design is that it used in-person speaker-listener participant pairs.
Our web-based paradigm might have made it more difficult for participants to adopt the rel-
evant perspectives.
Our task asks participants to imagine themselves as one of the participants in a conversa-
tion. One threat to the external validity of our experiment comes from this aspect of the task. In
a real conversation, of course, each conversation partner does not need to imagine themselves
in a particular setting: they are located in that setting. Our task is therefore more akin to what
happens in complicated uses of grammatically perspectival expressions, such as reported
speech and narrative processing, than in simple dyadic conversations.
We measure the extent to which participants are able to adopt the perspectives of the char-
acters they were instructed to imagine themselves as using our spatial control task. In the com-
prehension experiments, participants were excluded from the study if they did not demonstrate
the ability to adopt the spatial perspective of the listener character. Due to the open-ended
nature of the production experiments, the spatial control items were not used as an exclusion
mechanism. However, our post-hoc data analysis reveals that participants rarely used their
own visual perspective on the scene, and described the scene according to the speaker’s per-
spective in most cases.
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Although we establish that the participants are capable of adopting the character’s perspec-
tives, using a dyadic in-person paradigm might change their behavior in other ways. For
instance, interacting with a human interlocutor could increase participants’ motivation to
communicate successfully. This might lead them to adopt their interlocutor’s perspective more
often. In the reference perspective-taking domain, Yoon et al. (2012) find that speakers take
into account the listener’s perspective more often when the speaker is making a request rather
than a statement, and Brown-Schmidt (2009) demonstrates that interactive tasks stimulate
more consideration of a partner’s perspective than non-interactive tasks. Replicating our find-
ings in an interactive dyadic paradigm is therefore a critical direction for future work.
CONCLUSION
Although grammatically perspectival expressions are cross-linguistically common, relatively
little is known about how they are processed. In this paper, we have contributed novel evi-
dence about the production and comprehension of one class of grammatically perspectival
expressions: perspectival motion verbs like come and go. We have explored two kinds of
models that have been much discussed in work on reference perspective-taking: a serial,
speaker-biased model that we call the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model, and a
simultaneous integration model, where conversation participants consider multiple perspec-
tives at once.
Our comprehension results support a simultaneous integration view of grammatical
perspective-taking: listeners appear to consider multiple perspectives at once when interpret-
ing grammatically perspectival expressions. However, our production results are more mixed:
we find no evidence of the Convergent Perspective Boost observed in comprehension, but we
do find evidence of a Ambiguity Elimination Advantage, which is difficult to account for in a
serial model of perspective selection like the speaker anchoring-and-adjustment model.
Taking into consideration our own data and the subsequent experimental work by Watson
et al. (2021), we argue for a simultaneous integration model in both comprehension and pro-
duction, providing experimental evidence from grammatical perspective-taking to support the
proposal that conversation participants reason jointly over multiple perspectives (Anderson &
Dillon, 2019; Harris, 2012), and paralleling findings for perspective-taking in reference
(Hawkins et al., 2021; Heller et al., 2016; Mozuraitis et al., 2018; Ryskin et al., 2020).
However, the explanation for the key difference in our production data and those of Watson
et al. (2021) remains unclear, motivating further work on grammatical perspective-taking in a
wider variety of contexts, and with different experimental paradigms.
Taken as a whole, our experiments reveal patterns in grammatical perspective-taking that
echo those in other domains of perspective-taking. We find that both speakers and listeners
have a preference for speaker-oriented perspectival expressions, but that speakers are more
strongly biased towards their own perspectives. Despite the differences between domains,
the existence of a strong speaker bias and the evidence in support of simultaneous perspective
integration parallel findings in related domains like reference perspective-taking and pronoun
resolution, suggesting that they may spring from more general properties of production and
comprehension.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Rajesh Bhatt, Daniel Altshuler, Mohit Iyyer, and the anonymous reviewers
at Open Mind for their thoughtful feedback on the experimental results and computational
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modeling. Thanks are also due to Judith Degen, Lyn Frazier, Richard Futrell, Jesse Harris, and
Daphna Heller for fruitful discussion. This work has benefited from discussion at the 2019
annual meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics and Rational Approaches in Lan-
guage Science 2019.
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APPENDIX A: POST-HOC ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL CONTROLS
To explore whether the ability of participants to take on the speaker’s perspective poses a
threat to the external validity of our task, a post-hoc analysis of the spatial control items
was performed. Responses to these items were coded 1 if they were true according to the
speaker’s perspective and not the scene viewer’s perspective; −1 if they were true according
to the scene viewer’s perspective and not the speaker’s, and 0 if they did not provide evidence
in either direction.
These data coding guidelines were not preregistered, and the data coding in this post-hoc
analysis was performed by only one annotator, unlike the main items, which were coded by an
author and a second annotator who did not know the purpose of the experiment.20
Experiment 2a
For the Between and Close conditions, 89% of the responses were true according to the
speaker’s perspective and not the visual perspective of the participant. 0.5% were true accord-
ing the visual perspective of the participant and not that of the speaker character. For the
Right/Left condition, 72% of the responses were true according to the speaker’s perspective
and not the visual perspective of the participant. 6% were true according the visual perspec-
tive of the participant and not that of the speaker character. Although a number of the
responses fall into the ambiguous category, this shows that in the majority of trials, participants
were adopting the speaker character’s perspective rather than relying on their own visual
perspective.
Experiment 2b
For the Between and Close conditions, 88% of the responses were true according to the
speaker’s perspective and not the visual perspective of the participant. 0.2% were true accord-
ing the visual perspective of the participant and not that of the speaker character. For the
Right/Left condition, 64% of the responses were true according to the speaker’s perspective
and not the visual perspective of the participant. 14% were true according the visual perspec-
tive of the participant and not that of the speaker character. Although the participants in Exper-
iment 2b struggled more with the Right/Left condition than those in Experiment 2a, we take
this as evidence that participants were, on the whole, able to adopt the spatial perspective of
the speaker character throughout the experiment.
20 Data coding guidelines and annotated data can be found in the Open Science Foundation repository for this
project: https://osf.io/3bsnz/?view_only=1091b1607b864161860f84dcafe3e425.
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