{"pk":28454,"title":"Integrating Common Ground and Informativeness in Pragmatic Word Learning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Pragmatic inferences are an integral part of language learn-ing and comprehension. To recover the intended meaning ofan utterance, listeners need to balance and integrate differentsources of contextual information. In a series of experiments,we studied how listeners integrate general expectations aboutspeakers with expectations specific to their interactional his-tory with a particular speaker. We used a Bayesian pragmaticsmodel to formalize the integration process. In Experiments1 and 2, we replicated previous findings showing that listenersmake inferences based on speaker-general and speaker-specificexpectations. We then used the empirical measurements fromthese experiments to generate model predictions about howthe two kinds of expectations should be integrated, which wetested in Experiment 3. Experiment 4 replicated and extendedExperiment 3 to a broader set of conditions. In both experi-ments, listeners based their inferences on both types of expec-tations. We found that model performance was also consistentwith this finding; with better fit for a model which incorporatedboth general and specific information compared to baselinesincorporating only one type. Listeners flexibly integrate dif-ferent forms of social expectations across a range of contexts,a process which can be described using Bayesian models ofpragmatic reasoning.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Pragmatics; Word learning; Common ground;Bayesian models"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69v4v60b","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Manuel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bohn","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"Henry","last_name":"Tessler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T23:30:00+05:30","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28454/galley/18325/download/"}]}