Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Listeners rapidly learn speaker-specific expectations and interpretations of words and phrases such as uncertainty expressions when they observe a speaker's use of these expressions. However, previous studies have exclusively examined this behavior in populations of listeners and it remains unclear to what extent there are systematic individual differences in listeners' adaptation behavior and, if such differences exist, whether they are linked to more general cognitive abilities. In this work, we first re-analyze the data by Schuster & Degen (2019) and show that listeners vary in the extent to which they adapt to different speakers. In a series of exploratory and confirmatory studies, we then show that the extent to which listeners update their expectations of different speakers is correlated with participant's score on the Keep Track Task (Yntema, 1963), which suggests that working memory control modulates listeners' semantic-pragmatic adaptation abilities.