I have a character say something indirect ("It's really cold in here"): what do experiments say makes an audience read it as a request, and what makes them not?
In a story-reading experiment, the same sentence ("Man, it's really cold in here") was read as a request far more often when the speaker could be inferred not to know about an obstacle (a broken heater) than when the speaker knew. Conventional forms ("Can you turn on the heater?") are described as easy; unconventional ones need inference about what the speaker knows. People differ widely in how much they use that knowledge. An fMRI study of spoken question-reply dialogues reports mentalising-network involvement for indirect replies. Limits: written second-person vignettes read by online participants, not film or drama dialogue.
In a story-reading experiment, the same sentence ("Man, it's really cold in here") was read as a request far more often when the speaker could be inferred not to know about an obstacle (a broken heater) than when the speaker knew. Conventional forms ("Can you turn on the heater?") are described as easy; unconventional ones need inference about what the speaker knows. People differ widely in how much they use that knowledge. An fMRI study of spoken question-reply dialogues reports mentalising-network involvement for indirect replies. Limits: written second-person vignettes read by online participants, not film or drama dialogue.
Curator qualifications: All excerpts located; indirect requests and what makes audiences infer them (experimental).
Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.
Structured fields
{
"citations": [
{
"url": "https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/trottbergen18.pdf",
"note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
},
{
"url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5015811/",
"note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
}
]
}Evidence claims
- [sourced_fact] In a story-reading experiment, the same sentence ("Man, it's really cold in here") was read as a request far more often when the speaker could be inferred not to know about an obstacle (a broken heater) than when the speaker knew. Conventional forms ("Can you turn on the heater?") are described as easy; unconventional ones need inference about what the speaker knows. People differ widely in how much they use that knowledge. An fMRI study of spoken question-reply dialogues reports mentalising-network involvement for indirect replies. Limits: written second-person vignettes read by online participants, not film or drama dialogue. · locator: candidate evidence excerpts source
Rights
| component | license | hosting | redistribution | modification | training | Evidence and notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| documentation | unknown | permitted | permitted | unknown | unknown | Applies to this original summary only, not to the cited sources. |