This paper explores how speakers choose between two utterance alternatives with similar syntactic properties and distinct yet related meanings. We consider the interaction of two speaker pressures: to mention accessible lexical items early in the utterance and to mention informative content early in the utterance, the latter of which is explicitly predicted by an incremental Rational Speech Act (IRSA) model. In Exp. 1, we observed a significant effect of accessibility on utterance choice in an online spoken production task, which elicited descriptions of the relationship between two entities using a provided verb. We found that making entities more accessible via foregrounding led speakers to mention them earlier. In Exp. 2, an interactive production task, both informativity and foregrounding were manipulated. While IRSA predicts more informative content to be mentioned earlier in the sentence, we observed neither significant effects of informativity nor of accessibility. Consistent with recent work on Good-Enough theories of production, we conclude that even when two sentences are not entirely meaning-equivalent, production choices can be affected by lexical accessibility; the pressure to mention informative material early, however, should be investigated further

Projection inferences are inferences about speaker commitment to a content embedded under an entailment-canceling operator, for example in polar interrogatives with clause-embedding predicates (Does John know that Julian dances salsa?). Speaker commitment to embedded content is modulated by multiple factors, including the predicate, interlocutors' prior beliefs about the content, and its at-issueness. We propose an RSA model of projection inferences in such environments. Crucially, we take the interpretive procedure to involve inferring a speaker's and attitude holder's belief in the content. In a behavioral study, we investigate inferred beliefs about contents embedded under the predicates “think” and “know” that listeners ascribe to the speaker and a potential attitude holder. We use the empirical data to parametrize the model. The resulting predictions mirror some, but not all, of the qualitative empirical patterns. This is a first step towards a systematic analysis of projection inferences using probabilistic pragmatic models.

While widely used in psycholinguistics, the linking hypothesis for eye movements in the visual world paradigm is still poorly understood. Recent work on linking hypotheses for referential tasks in particular has found mixed support for the 'Referential Belief Link': that the proportion of looks to a referent in a time window reflects participants' degree of belief that the referent is the intended target in that time window. Here we test the hypothesis that participants' expectations for the utterances observed in an experiment modulate the extent to which the Referential Belief Link holds. This hypothesis is motivated by a simple idea: when utterances are unexpected, listeners engage in additional reasoning to make sense of the observed signal. In a re-analysis of a previous eye movement and incremental decision task dataset, in conjunction with two novel production experiments, we find that the more surprising an observed utterance is, the smaller the correlation between explicit and implicit beliefs is. We discuss the importance of participants' production expectations in research using the visual world paradigm.

Using evidential expressions to indicate one’s source of information for an utterance tends to convey uncertainty on the speaker’s part. Previous accounts of this uncertainty inference attribute it to either extralinguistic reasoning about evidence directness, or to pragmatic reasoning about alternative utterances. Here we present a novel hybrid account, and introduce a set of utterances which allows us to tease apart the three accounts’ predictions. We test these predictions in two studies by manipulating the directness of evidence indicated by an evidential expression. Exp. 1 shows that listeners infer more uncertainty with extreme values of directness. Exp. 2 shows that speakers are more likely to indicate evidence in contexts where the evidence is unreliable. We argue that these findings support an account which involves both extralinguistic and pragmatic reasoning, and develop a formal implementation of such an account within the Rational Speech Act framework.

Asking and answering questions is a staple of human communication. To answer a question effectively, a hearer must interpret the speaker's intention given the specific question asked. ‘Wh’-questions like ‘Where can I get coffee?’ are underspecified for (non-)exhaustivity, i.e., how many answers must be provided to resolve the speaker's goal. Intuitions from the semantics literature report that questions are generally exhaustive, and non-exhaustive only in the context of specific linguistic factors (e.g., the modal ‘can’, certain ‘wh’-words). To test these assumptions, we collected question paraphrase ratings for naturally occurring root questions in variable linguistic contexts. In contrast to previous claims, we find that questions are not biased for exhaustivity. However, other prior observations are supported by the data. We argue that a full account of the observed distribution of meanings must integrate discourse factors like the hearer's estimate of the speaker's goal, alongside (or subsuming the effect of) linguistic cues.

Understanding referring expression generation has long been of interest to psycholinguistics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. Experimental data in the former two has shown that referring expression generation is modulated by both pragmatic and cognitive considerations, and the latter suggests that referring expressions have social meaning beyond their literal referential utility. This project integrates these three accounts by extending Burnett (2017)'s socially-enriched implementation of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework to account for variation in referring expressions used to denote transgender women in two politically opposed media corpora. Our findings highlight the utility of the RSA framework in explaining socially-modulated variation while also accounting for pragmatic and cognitive considerations. Finally, this paper contributes to growing literatures that address the relationship between (alt-)right ideologies about gender and language by highlighting the use of bioessentialist language such as 'biological male' in the propagation of anti-trans rhetoric in the United States.

Speakers exhibit variability in their choice between uncertaintyexpressions such as might and probably. Recent work hasfound that listeners cope with such variability by updating theirexpectations about how a specific speaker uses uncertainty ex-pressions when interacting with a single speaker. However, itis still unclear to what extent listeners form speaker-specificexpectations for multiple speakers and to what extent listenersare adapting to a situation independent of the speakers. Here,we take a first step towards answering these questions. In Ex-periment 1, listeners formed speaker-specific expectations af-ter being exposed to two speakers whose use of uncertaintyexpressions differed. In Experiment 2, listeners who were ex-posed to two speakers with identical use of uncertainty expres-sions formed considerably stronger expectations than in Exper-iment 1. This suggests that listeners form both speaker-specificand situation-specific expectations. We discuss the implica-tions of these results for theories of adaptation.

Scalar inferences are commonly assumed to involve both lit-eral semantic interpretation and social cognitive reasoning.However, the precise way to characterize listeners’ represen-tation of context - including the space of possible utterance al-ternatives as well as the space of possible conventional mean-ings associated with linguistic forms - is a matter of ongoingdebate. We report a partial replication of a scalar inferencepriming study by Rees and Bott (2018), introducing a novelbaseline condition against which to compare behavior acrossdifferent priming treatments. We also investigate the effectof raising participants’ awareness of communicatively strongeralternatives that explicitly encode an exhaustive meaning (e.g.some but not all with respect to some). Our results suggestthat exhaustive alternatives (which are ‘symmetric’ to canoni-cal alternatives) can modulate the availability and strength ofscalar inferences, and that semantic uncertainty is an indepen-dent channel through which scalar inferences are modulated.We discuss implications for theories of pragmatic competence.

Contrastive inferences, whereby a listener pragmatically infersa speaker’s referential intention of a partial referring expres-sion like the yellow by reasoning about other objects in thecontext, are notoriously unstable. We report a production-centric model of interpretation couched within the RationalSpeech Act framework. Adjective production probabilities alistener expects for objects in a context drive the size of con-trastive inferences: the greater the asymmetry in expectationfor a speaker to use a pre-nominal adjective for the target ratherthan for competitors, the greater the listener’s resulting targetpreference. Modifier production probabilities were collected(Exp. 1) and used to make predictions about comprehensionin an incremental decision task (Exp. 2). The model’s inter-pretation predictions are supported by the data. This accounthas the potential to explain the fluctuating appearance of con-trastive inferences and shifts the explanatory focus away fromcontrastive inference towards online interpretation of referringexpressions more broadly.