Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language that describes people in a concise manner may con-flict with social norms (e.g., referring to people by their race),presenting a conflict between transferring information effi-ciently and avoiding offensive language. When a speakeris describing others, we propose that listeners consider thespeaker’s use or absence of potentially offensive language toreason about the speaker’s goals. We formalize this hypothe-sis in a probabilistic model of polite pragmatic language un-derstanding, and use it to generate predictions about interpre-tations of utterances in ambiguous contexts, which we testempirically. We find that participants are sensitive to poten-tially offensive language when resolving ambiguity in refer-ence. These results support the idea that listeners representconflicts in speakers’ goals and use that uncertainty to inter-pret otherwise underspecified utterances.