{"pk":28037,"title":"Pragmatic Inference of Intended Referents from Binomial Word Order","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How does listeners’ perceptual bias influence their interpreta-tion of an ambiguous multiword utterance? We address thisquestion by investigating the relationship between word or-der in a binomial (an expression of type “A and B”) and vi-sual properties of image pairs serving as its potential referents.We found that listeners’ choices were strongly influenced byiconicity and relative salience of images within the pair: par-ticipants preferred referents where the first mentioned imagewas located on the left, as well as pairs where the first im-age was larger than the second image. The effect of image or-der tended to be stronger than the influence of image size, andboth were modulated by participants’ general visual field pref-erences (determined in a separate experimental condition). Wefurther show that binomial phrase interpretation can be simu-lated by a Rational Speech Act model that includes both wordorder effects and utterance-independent preferences of the par-ticipants.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"pragmatics; binomials; reference resolution; ob-ject salience; Rational Speech Act theory"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11n6w5tx","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Anna","middle_name":"A","last_name":"Ivanova","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Roger","middle_name":"P","last_name":"Levy","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28037/galley/17676/download/"}]}