Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language is frequently ambiguous, with the same sentence having several possibleinterpretations. One prevalent exampleis third-person pronouns. Hartshorne, Gerstenberg, & Tenenbaum (2014) HGT2014 model pronoun interpretation asan inference over a generative model of the speaker. An advantage of the generative intuitive theory approach is thatit incorporates a flexible, quantitative model of world knowledge rather than a list of facts and heuristics. The authorsformalized this world knowledge as inference over a generative model of the world. We directly test this flexibilityby changing the rules of the world (e.g., through scenarios that reverse the normal relationship between strength andprobability of winning tug-of-war), which according to HGT2014 should directly affect pronoun interpretation. We findthat model predictions and participant judgments align well in such scenarios, supporting HGT2014 and challenging othertheories of pronoun resolution. We discuss this work in the context of recent work on intuitive theories.