Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Generic statements convey generalizations about categories,but how generic predications combine is unclear. “Elephantslive in Africa and Asia” does not mean that individual ele-phants live on both continents. In addition, such conjunc-tive generics pose interesting questions for theories of incre-mental processing because the meaning of the sentence canchange part-way through: “Elephants live in Africa” would im-ply most or all do, but “Africa and Asia” implies some live ineach. We extend a recently proposed computational model ofgeneric language understanding with an incremental process-ing mechanism that can begin to interpret an utterance beforea speaker has finished their sentence. This model makes novelpredictions about partial interpretations of conjunctive genericsentences, which we test in two behavioral experiments. Theresults support a strong view of incrementality, wherein lis-teners continuously update their beliefs based on expectationsabout where a speaker will go next with their utterance.