Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Pragmatic inferences are an integral part of language learn-ing and comprehension. To recover the intended meaning ofan utterance, listeners need to balance and integrate differentsources of contextual information. In a series of experiments,we studied how listeners integrate general expectations aboutspeakers with expectations specific to their interactional his-tory with a particular speaker. We used a Bayesian pragmaticsmodel to formalize the integration process. In Experiments1 and 2, we replicated previous findings showing that listenersmake inferences based on speaker-general and speaker-specificexpectations. We then used the empirical measurements fromthese experiments to generate model predictions about howthe two kinds of expectations should be integrated, which wetested in Experiment 3. Experiment 4 replicated and extendedExperiment 3 to a broader set of conditions. In both experi-ments, listeners based their inferences on both types of expec-tations. We found that model performance was also consistentwith this finding; with better fit for a model which incorporatedboth general and specific information compared to baselinesincorporating only one type. Listeners flexibly integrate dif-ferent forms of social expectations across a range of contexts,a process which can be described using Bayesian models ofpragmatic reasoning.