Relevance in Cognition: Interest and Mental Effort
Defining Relevance
A. Interest (Cognitive Effects)
The criterion for evaluating possible interpretations that Sperber and Wilson propose in Relevance develops from a basic assumption about human cognition. The assumption is that human cognition is relevance-oriented: our whole cognitive system is geared to picking out information that is potentially relevant to us.
Information can be relevant without being communicated at all. Sperber & Wilson want to define a notion of relevance that applies not just to information communicated by utterances but to all information, acquired from any source. They define relevance as a potential property of inputs to cognitive processes, whether external stimuli or internal representations. Information can be relevant in one context and not in another, so the basic notion they want to define is that of relevance in a context. By a ‘context’, they mean a set of assumptions used in interpreting a given item of information. Their fundamental claim is that new information is relevant in a context when it interacts with the context in one of three ways, to yield what in relevance theory are called cognitive effects:
Cognitive Effects (of Processing an Input in a Context):
- a. Strengthening an assumption;
- b. Contradicting and eliminating an assumption;
- c. Combining with an assumption to yield a contextual implication (i.e. conclusions deducible from new information and context together, but from neither new information nor context taken separately).
B. Mental Effort
The notion of processing effort is a psychological one. Consider the form in which information is presented. Imagine exactly the same information being presented, first in a clearly printed form; second as a faint photocopy; third as an illegible handwritten scrawl; fourth translated into a language you read only with difficulty. Each of these versions will demand different amounts of effort from you. Though they carry exactly the same information, you will have to work harder to retrieve it from one version than from another, and this may affect your willingness to attend to it at all.
Some contextual assumptions are easier to construct or retrieve from memory than others, and this will again affect the intuitive relevance of the information you process, and your willingness to attend to it. Sometimes, the hearer will be unable to obtain an appropriate set of contextual assumptions, and should therefore fail to understand the utterance at all.
A hearer unable to access these assumptions would be unable to see the point of the passer-by’s response. Factors known to affect the effort needed to process an utterance include:
- a. Recency of use (of words, constructions, contextual assumptions);
- b. Frequency of use (of words, constructions, contextual assumptions);
- c. Linguistic complexity (of the words or constructions used);
- d. Logical complexity (of the sentence uttered);
- e. Accessibility of the context (illustrated above);
- f. Size of the context.
By building the notion of processing effort into the definition of relevance, we thus make it possible to take all these factors into account in explaining how utterances are understood, and how their appropriateness is assessed.