Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Aim of our research is an analysis of the inferential processes involved in a speaker's evaluation of the communicative effect achieved on a hearer. We present a computational model where such evaluation process relies on two main factors which may vary according to their strength: 1. the verbal commitment of the hearer to play his role in the behavioral game actually bid by the speaker, 2. the personal beliefs of the speaker concerning bearer's beliefs. The hypothesis was tested as follows. First, we devised a questionnaire in order to collect human subjects' evaluations of communicative effects. Subjects were required to consider some scenarios and to identify themselves with a speaker. Their task was to evaluate, for each scenario, the conmunicative effect they had reached on the hearer (acceptance to play the game, refusal, or indecision). Then, we implemented our computational model in a connectionist network; we chose a set of input variables whose combination describes all the scenarios, and we used part of the experimental data to train the network. Finally, we compared the outputs of the network with the evaluations performed by the human subjects. The results are satisfactory.