Speaker knowledgeability and informativity inferences

Abstract

Conversational partners expect each other to communicate rationally and cooperatively and to contribute relevant and informative utterances. Often however, listeners infer additional meaning over and above the explicit content of an utterance. The present study investigates how speaker characteristics influence inferencing. Experiment 1 (N=205) demonstrates that when produced by knowledgeable speakers utterances such as “the library walls are blue” are more likely to be understood as conveying that the library walls have changed. Experiment 2 (N=205) finds that these inferences are more likely to arise when produced by a speaker who is not typically very chatty; reticent speakers have a higher threshold of what is considered an appropriate conversational contribution. Taken together, the findings from these studies demonstrate that listeners have pervasive expectations of cooperativity and if conversational contributions fail to satisfy this then listeners will engage in sophisticated reasoning to reconcile the mismatch between expectations and input.

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task

“…This explanation would corroborate previous corpus research which considers denial as one of the primary functions of negation (Givón, 1978;Horn, 2001;Tottie, 1991). Furthermore, it would endorse previous experimental studies which stressed the importance of the context of plausible denial in decreasing the processing cost associated with negation (Rees & Rohde, 2022;Wason, 1965; see also Albu et al, 2021). If this interpretation of the results is correct, then little difference is expected between positive and negative sentences, which is the case in our study, but also in other studies (Dudschig et al, 2019;Fischler et al, 1983).…”