Abstract
Beliefs about the world affect language processing and interpretation in several empirical domains. In two experiments, we tested whether subjective prior beliefs about the probability of utterance content modulate projection, that is, listeners’ inferences about speaker commitment to that content. We find that prior beliefs predict projection at both the group and the participant level: the higher the prior belief in a content, the more speakers are taken to be committed to it. This result motivates the integration of formal analyses of projection with cognitive theories of language understanding.
Highlights
Formal linguistic research on meaning in the tradition of Montague (1973), which is devoted to specifying how meanings of expressions are computed from the meanings of the parts of the expressions, the way the parts are combined, and the contexts in which the expressions are used, has often sidelined world knowledge as nonlinguistic, encyclopedic knowledge that must enter into the meaning computation, but whose effect has eluded systematic investigation and formalization
Prior Beliefs Modulate Projection Degen and Tonhauser for accounts of meaning computation to include a mechanism for integrating subjective prior beliefs
Because Sam’s knowledge is questioned or even denied in these variants, that is, the inference to (ii) does not persist, these inferences to (i) cannot be attributed to the aforementioned lexical meaning of know. This phenomenon of speaker commitment to utterance content that occurs in negated sentences or questions is termed projection
Summary
Psycholinguistic work has documented several ways in which probabilistic beliefs about the world, often termed world knowledge, affect language processing (e.g., Chambers et al, 2002; Hagoort et al, 2004; Hald et al, 2007; Warren & McConnell, 2007), including syntactic ambiguity resolution (e.g., Bicknell & Rohde, 2014; Chambers et al, 2004), reference resolution (e.g., Hanna & Tanenhaus, 2004; Winograd, 1972), genericity (e.g., Tessler & Goodman, 2019), scalar implicature (e.g., Degen et al, 2015), underinformativity implicatures (Kravtchenko & Demberg, 2015), and the production of redundant referring expressions (Degen et al, 2020; Mitchell et al, 2013; Rubio-Fernández, 2016; Sedivy, 2003; Westerbeek et al, 2015). We provide empirical evidence from English that projection, a key topic in linguistic research on meaning, is systematically modulated by listeners’ subjective beliefs about the world. Because Sam’s knowledge is questioned or even denied in these variants, that is, the inference to (ii) does not persist, these inferences to (i) cannot be attributed to the aforementioned lexical meaning of know. This phenomenon of speaker commitment to utterance content that occurs in negated sentences or questions is termed projection. Decades of research in formal semantics have aimed to explain why content projects (e.g., Beaver & Geurts, 2014; Langendoen & Savin, 1971)
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