Information integration in modulation of pragmatic inferences during online language comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker’s pragmatic competence. In a series of eye tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top-down information–knowledge about the particular speaker’s pragmatic competence—and bottom-up cues—distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment. We find that bottom-up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener’s contrastive inferences, with or without top-down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication.