Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore the impact of speaker identity on the interpretation of number words in a T(ruth)-V(alue) J(udgment) task – a paradigm in which respondents assess whether a given description appropriately represents a given body of facts. We find that imprecise statements from speakers socially expected to be less precise – i.e. “Chill” ones – are rejected at a higher rate, and thus held to more stringent evaluation standards, than those from speakers socially expected to speak more precisely – i.e. “Nerdy” ones, and especially so when participants do not identify with the speaker’s properties. This shows that TVJ assessments are impacted by respondents’ social perception of the speaker; but that they are affected by social considerations in a different way from other experimental tasks similarly tapping into meaning interpretation, suggesting a nuanced interplay between social information and pragmatic reasoning