Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmaticmeaning, but these both involve consequences typically in-tended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentionalmeaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyondwhat was intended. Here, we present a Bayesian analysis ofhow, to a listener, the meaning of an utterance can significantlydiffer from a speaker’s intended meaning. Our model em-phasizes how comprehending the intentional and unintentionalmeaning of speech-acts requires listeners to engage in sophisti-cated model-based perspective-taking and reasoning about thehistory of the state of the world, each other’s actions, and eachother’s observations. To test our model, we have human partic-ipants make judgments about vignettes where speakers makeutterances that could be interpreted as intentional insults or un-intentional faux pas. In elucidating the mechanics of speech-acts with unintentional meanings, our account provides insightinto how communication both functions and malfunctions.