Imprecision, personae, and pragmatic reasoning

Recent work at the interface of semantics and sociolinguistics showed that listeners reason about the semantic/pragmatic properties of linguistic utterances to draw social inferences about the speaker (Acton and Potts 2014; Beltrama 2018; Jeong 2021). These findings raise the question of whether reverse effects exist as well, i.e., whether (and how) social meanings can also impact the interpretation of semantic/pragmatic meanings. Using (im)precision as a case study, we provide experimental evidence that (i) numerals receive stricter interpretations when utteredbyNerdy(vs. Chill) speakers; and that (ii) this effect is stronger for comprehenders who don’t (strongly) identify with the speaker, suggesting that pragmatic reasoning is crucially shaped by social information about both the speaker and the comprehender. These findings suggest that different layers of meanings inform one another in a bi-directional fashion – i.e., semantic information can invite social inferences, and Misocial information can guide meaning interpretation.

Age-Related Decline in Pragmatic Reasoning of Older Adults

As speech is often ambiguous, pragmatic reasoning—the process of integrating multiple sources of information including semantics, ostensive cues and contextual information (Bohn & Frank, 2019)—is essential to understanding a speaker’s intentions. Despite current literature suggesting that certain social cognitive processes such as gaze-processing (Slessor et al., 2014) appear to be impaired in late adulthood, it is not well understood if pragmatic reasoning decline with age. Here, we examined young adults’ (aged 19-25; n=41) and older adults’ (aged 60-79; n=41) ability to engage in pragmatic reasoning in a cue integration task. In Experiment 1, participants had to integrate contextual (participants and speaker knew there were two novel objects but the latter could only see one), semantic (“There’s the [novel-label]” or “Where’s the [novel-label]”), and gaze (speaker looked at the mutually-visible object) cues to identify the referent (Nurmsoo & Bloom, 2008). In Experiment 2, participants received contextual and semantic cues less gaze cue. In both experiments, the target referent object for “There” and “Where” trials was the mutually-visible object and the object the speaker could not see respectively. Overall, young adults outperformed older adults, even in the simpler two-cue Experiment 2 (ps<.006). While older adults were significantly above chance in “There” trials for both experiments as well as “Where” trials in Experiment 2 (ps<.05), they had specific difficulty in integrating three cues in “Where” trials, where a more sophisticated interpretation of the multiple cues was required (p=.42). Our findings provide important insights into an age-related decline of pragmatic reasoning in older adults.

The Probabilistic Turn in Semantics and Pragmatics

This article provides an overview of graded and probabilistic approaches in semantics and pragmatics. These approaches share a common set of core research goals: ( a) a concern with phenomena that are best described as graded, including a vast lexicon of words whose meaning adapts flexibly to the contexts in which they are used, as well as reasoning under uncertainty about interlocutors, their goals, and their strategies; ( b) the need to show that representations are learnable, that a listener can learn semantic representations and pragmatic reasoning from data; ( c) an emphasis on empirical evaluation against experimental data or corpus data at scale; and ( d) scaling up to the full size of the lexicon. The methods used are sometimes explicitly probabilistic and sometimes not. Previously, there were assumed to be clear boundaries among probabilistic frameworks, classifiers in machine learning, and distributional approaches, but these boundaries have been blurred. Frameworks in semantics and pragmatics use all three of these, sometimes in combination, to address the four core research questions above. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Great ape communication as contextual social inference: a computational modeling perspective

Human communication has been described as a contextual social inference process. Research into great ape communication has been inspired by this view to look for the evolutionary roots of the social, cognitive, and interactional processes involved in human communication. This approach has been highly productive, yet it is often compromised by a too-narrow focus on how great apes use and understand individual signals. In this paper, we introduce a computational model that formalizes great ape communication as a multi-faceted social inference process that relies on information contained in the signal, the relationship between communicative partners, and the social context. This model makes accurate qualitative and quantitative predictions about real-world communicative interactions between semi-wild-living chimpanzees. When enriched with a pragmatic reasoning process, the model explains repeatedly reported differences between humans and great apes in the interpretation of ambiguous signals (e.g. pointing gestures). This approach has direct implications for observational and experimental studies of great ape communication and provides a new tool for theorizing about the evolution of uniquely human communication.

Are Narrow Focus Exhaustivity Inferences Bayesian Inferences?

In successful communication, the literal meaning of linguistic utterances is often enriched by pragmatic inferences. Part of the pragmatic reasoning underlying such inferences has been successfully modeled as Bayesian goal recognition in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this paper, we try to model the interpretation of question-answer sequences with narrow focus in the answer in the RSA framework, thereby exploring the effects of domain size and prior probabilities on interpretation. Should narrow focus exhaustivity inferences be actually based on Bayesian inference involving prior probabilities of states, RSA models should predict a dependency of exhaustivity on these factors. We present experimental data that suggest that interlocutors do not act according to the predictions of the RSA model and that exhaustivity is in fact approximately constant across different domain sizes and priors. The results constitute a conceptual challenge for Bayesian accounts of the underlying pragmatic inferences.

Reevaluating pragmatic reasoning in language games

The results of a highly influential study that tested the predictions of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model suggest that (a) listeners use pragmatic reasoning in one-shot web-based referential communication games despite the artificial, highly constrained, and minimally interactive nature of the task, and (b) that RSA accurately captures this behavior. In this work, we reevaluate the contribution of the pragmatic reasoning formalized by RSA in explaining listener behavior by comparing RSA to a baseline literal listener model that is only driven by literal word meaning and the prior probability of referring to an object. Across three experiments we observe only modest evidence of pragmatic behavior in one-shot web-based language games, and only under very limited circumstances. We find that although RSA provides a strong fit to listener responses, it does not perform better than the baseline literal listener model. Our results suggest that while participants playing the role of the Speaker are informative in these one-shot web-based reference games, participants playing the role of the Listener only rarely take this Speaker behavior into account to reason about the intended referent. In addition, we show that RSA’s fit is primarily due to a combination of non-pragmatic factors, perhaps the most surprising of which is that in the majority of conditions that are amenable to pragmatic reasoning, RSA (accurately) predicts that listeners will behave non-pragmatically. This leads us to conclude that RSA’s strong overall correlation with human behavior in one-shot web-based language games does not reflect listener’s pragmatic reasoning about informative speakers.

Effect of theory of the mind on the pragmatic reasoning of scalar implicatures

Antecedentes: Diferentes autores discuten que para que el razonamiento pragmático pueda ocurrir, es necesaria la activación de un módulo mental que permite razonar acerca de los estados mentales propios y de los demás, esto se conoce como teoría de la mente. Sin embargo, la evidencia empírica no es concluyente. Objetivo: Determinar el efecto de la teoría de la mente en el razonamiento pragmático de implicaturas escalares. Metodología: Mediante un diseño experimental intrasujeto 2x2 se evaluaron 111 individuos entre 20 y 45 años edad. Se les presentaron estímulos mentalistas y no mentalistas y se midieron los tiempos de respuesta y la precisión de esta según la tarea de verificación de oraciones. Resultados: se encontraron diferencias significativas en el tiempo de respuesta de oraciones pragmáticas de acuerdo con la presentación de estímulos mentalistas vs no mentalistas. Conclusiones: Esto nos permitió inferir que la teoría de la mente cumple un rol significativo en el razonamiento pragmático, apoyando así el enfoque postgriceano.