Interlocutor identity

Relevant Publications

• Caffarra S, Wolpert M, Scarinci D, Mancini S, 2020 | Who are you talking to? The role of addressee identity in utterance comprehension
• Wolpert M, Mancini S, Caffarra S, 2017 | Addressee Identity and Morphosyntactic Processing in Basque Allocutive Agreement

Sentence processing does not rely solely on syntax and semantics – pragmatics, or information that is not directly present in the linguistic message (i.e., suprasegmental), is also an essential part of language. Pragmatic information includes the interlocutor identity. Knowing who is saying something may be just as important as what is said. Some languages challenge the distinction of pragmatics as suprasegmental by directly encoding pragmatic information in the grammar.

We took advantage of such a linguistic feature in Basque where non-argument interlocutor information is encoded in morphosyntax, called allocutive agreement. This allocutive agreement occurs in the informal register hika, which is traditionally used only between the closest of friends, but has since enjoyed greater use and may be a signifier of a strong Basque identity. In allocutive agreement, there is obligatory inflectional agreement between 3rd person auxilary verbs and the gender of the addressee when the addressee is not an argument of the verb. We used conversations where allocutive verb forms were either congruent or incongruent with addressee identity, while using reaction time and ERPs to measure participants’ detection of the allocutive agreement violation.

Although other research has shown that speaker identity impacts comprehension at the earliest levels of processing, our data suggest that not all pragmatic information is so salient. Instead, knowledge about the identity of non-speaker interlocutors, including the addressee, may only influence processing at later stages. Check out the two articles linked above to find out more!