{"pk":26342,"title":"Communicating generalizations about events","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Habitual sentences (e.g. Bill smokes.) generalize an event overtime, but how do you know when a habitual sentence is true?We develop a computational model and use this to guide exper-iments into the truth conditions of habitual language. In Ex-pts. 1 & 2, we measure participants’ prior expectations aboutthe frequency with which an event occurs and validate thepredictions of the model for when a habitual sentence is ac-ceptable. In Expt. 3, we show that habituals are sensitive totop-down moderators of expected frequency: It is the expec-tation of future tendency that matters for habitual language.This work provides the mathematical glue between our intu-itive theories’ of others and events and the language we useto talk about them.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"events; generics; pragmatics;Bayesian data analysis; Bayesian cognitive model"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2n80s89b","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"Henry","last_name":"Tessler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26342/galley/15978/download/"}]}