Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Linguistic devices that mark confidence (uncertainty) havebeen well documented (e.g., choice of modals, hedges, etc),yet there has been surprisingly little empirical work thatexplicitly measures how uncertainty is signaled andinterpreted. We present an initial report on a project designedto investigate how interlocutors communicate uncertainty anduse that information in acquiring new information andintegrating interlocutor based input with their prior beliefs.Experiment 1 establishes that speakers and listeners agree onthe relative degree of uncertainty for a set of phrases.Experiment 2 manipulated how likely it was that a participantwould recognize an object using images that varied inrecoverability, finding that recoverability mapped ontocertainty. Experiment 3 used a word-learning paradigm toestablish that learners take into account the certainty withwhich a speaker labels uses a novel word to label a novelshape.