Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper examines the interaction between prior beliefs andpragmatic inferences, focusing on exhaustivity effects. Wepresent three experiments that tests how prior beliefs influenceboth interpretation and production of language, and comparethe results with the predictions of the Rational Speech Actmodel, a Bayesian model of linguistic interpretation. We findthat prior beliefs about conditional probabilities have no affecton language production, but do affect interpretation, producinganti-exhaustivity effects. We find that the RSA model achievesa relatively good fit both for the human production and inter-pretation data, but only for highly-implausible utterance costs.