Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human behavior is often remarkably flexible, showing theability to quickly adapt to the statistical peculiarities of aparticular local context. When it comes to language, previ-ous work has shown that listeners’ anticipatory interpretationsof intonational cues are adapted dynamically when cues areobserved to be stochastically unreliable. This paper reportsnovel empirical data from manual response dynamics (mouse-tracking) on how listeners adapt their predictive interpretationwhen some intonational cues are occasionally unreliable whileothers are consistently reliable. A model of rational belief dy-namics predicts that listeners adapt differently to different un-reliable intonational cues, as a function of their initial eviden-tial strength. These predictions are borne out by our data.