Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Relevance Theory (RT: Sperber&Wilson, 1986) argues that human interpretative processes maximize relevance andpostulates that there is a relevance-based procedure that a listener follows when trying to understand utterances. However, Maz-zone (2013) points out that RT fails to explain how speaker-related information, such as the speaker’s abilities or preferences, isincorporated into pragmatic processes. He proposes that situational or goal schemata, with the speaker represented as a compo-nent, are sufficient to activate the hearer’s speaker-related knowledge and further asserts that human communication is drivenby goal management and action rather than relevance maximization. Yet Mazzone cannot fully explain how linguistic meaningand speaker-related knowledge are integrated within a modular system. Based on RT’s cognitive requirements and contempo-rary cognitive theory, we argue that this integration is realized within working memory via production-like conversational ruleswith which the constructed utterance interpretation should be consistent, and present a simple model of this process.