RT list: Cognitive effects and processing effort

- probably the reason why Bach thinks precise assessment of relevance is "the most obvious problem" to RT as a theory of communication is that, according to RT, competent communicators make very precise predictions indeed about what would be most relevant to individual hearers and in what way, and often with fair success (i.e. similarity of thought sufficient for the speaker's purposes). While of course this doesn't require any quantitative measurement, local comparisons of actually competing information or sensitivity to joules and spread of activation wouldn't do either, since the assessment is about someone else's mind. So prima facie, people seem, independently of science and experimentation, to use some naive relevance theory which appears to be more fine-grained (or global? or behaviour-oriented?) than RT. Anyway, this was roughly Bach's question in the commentary to the Précis of 1987, and I'd love to learn what the current RT answer is...

Best,
Jan
Received on Sun Oct 15 14:35:58 2006