Zoom link:  https://mit.zoom.us/j/92182352856

Speaker: Alicia Chen

Affiliation: SaxeLab

Title: Signaling social identity in referential communication

Abstract: The words we use don’t just convey information about the world, they also convey information about who we are as speakers, marking our social identity. Yet formal models of referential communication have focused on the trade-off between informativity and efficiency, rather than how these considerations might also compete with a goal to signal social affiliation.
In this project, we investigate how speakers intentionally signal in-group membership through their choice of referential expressions. Across three experiments, we measure the systematic interaction between audience (who we are talking to) and goal (what we want to accomplish in the social interaction). We find that the observed behavior is best explained by a model where speakers consider not only whether listeners will understand their message, but also whether their choice of words will mark them as an in-group member.