Abstract
According to Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quantity, rational talkers formulate their utterances to be as economical as possible while conveying all necessary information. Naturally produced referential expressions, however, often contain more or less information than what is predicted to be optimal given a rational speaker model. How do listeners cope with these variations in the linguistic input? We argue that listeners navigate the variability in referential resolution by calibrating their expectations for the amount of linguistic signal to be expended for a certain meaning and by doing so in a context- or a talker-specific manner. Focusing on talker-specificity, we present four experiments. We first establish that speakers will generalize information from a single pair of adjectives to unseen adjectives in a speaker-specific manner (Experiment 1). Initially focusing on exposure to underspecified utterances, Experiment 2 examines: (a) the dimension of generalization; (b) effects of the strength of the evidence (implicit or explicit); and (c) individual differences in dimensions of generalization. Experiments 3 and 4 ask parallel questions for exposure to over-specified utterances, where we predict more conservative generalization because, in spontaneous utterances, talkers are more likely to over-modify than under-modify.
Highlights
A key feature of human language is that there are many-to-many mappings between referents and linguistic expressions
We propose that future models of reference production should take into account how interlocutors negotiate their referential expressions to find the most optimal level of reference given their certainty about the contextual and mutually shared information
Unlike adults, have difficulty associating under-modifying utterances with an individual talker (Pogue et al, 2015)
Summary
A key feature of human language is that there are many-to-many mappings between referents and linguistic expressions. One influential hypothesis is that listeners cope with this mapping problem by assuming that speakers behave rationally, formulating their utterances to be as economical as possible while conveying all necessary information (Grice, 1975). By assuming a rational model of the speaker, listeners can make predictions about the referring expression that maximize the informativity of a linguistic element, where informativity is defined as the amount of uncertainty that is reduced by the element given the set of plausible referents in the current referential domain (Frank and Goodman, 2012). A rational language user model predicts that when given blue participants should most frequently choose the blue square rather than the blue circle This is because if the talker had meant the blue circle, she should have used the more informative (unambiguous) description circle.
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