Wonky worlds: Listeners revise world knowledge when utterances are odd

نویسندگان

  • Judith Degen
  • Michael Henry Tessler
  • Noah D. Goodman
چکیده

World knowledge enters into pragmatic utterance interpretation in complex ways, and may be defeasible in light of speakers’ utterances. Yet there is to date a surprising lack of systematic investigation into the role of world knowledge in pragmatic inference. In this paper, we show that a state-of-the-art model of pragmatic interpretation greatly overestimates the influence of world knowledge on the interpretation of utterances like Some of the marbles sank. We extend the model to capture the idea that the listener is uncertain about the background knowledge the speaker is bringing to the conversation. This extension greatly improves model predictions of listeners’ interpretation and also makes good qualitative predictions about listeners’ judgments of how ‘normal’ the world is in light of a speaker’s statement. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

برای دانلود رایگان متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Pragmatic skills predict online counterfactual comprehension: Evidence from the N400

Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false. Communicating these thoughts through language poses a social-communicative challenge because listeners typically expect a speaker to produce true utterances, but counterfactuals per definition convey information that is false. Listeners must therefore incorporate overt linguistic cues (subjunctive mood, s...

متن کامل

Conceptual Reasoning Conceptual Reasoning Belief, Multiple Agents and Preference

One of the central issues in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning is common sense reasoning. This includes logics of knowledge and belief, nonmonotonic reasoning, truth-maintenance, and belief revision. Within these elds the notion of a consistent belief state is the crucial one. Additionally, there is a growing interest in partial information states. Within this interest informat...

متن کامل

What Characters Know: Projected Knowledge and Projected Co-Presence

What inferences do readers make about “who knows what” in narrative worlds? We introduce the concepts of projected knowledge and projected co-presence to describe circumstances in which readers infer that characters possess information presented, for example, only in narration. Our experiments examine one type of evidence readers use to project knowledge. In Experiment 1, readers used character...

متن کامل

Constructing Imaginary Worlds with Hands : Do Knowledge Levels of an Explainee Induce Different Gestures from Explainers?

The human spontaneous gestures that accompany ones speech are a tool used to express ones thinking. Also, as the environment changes, one changes the mental representation accordingly to adjust to that environment. The present study investigates if an explainer regards a listener as part of the environment surrounding him/her and if that explainer changes gesture patterns when explaining concep...

متن کامل

Accentuation and Interpretation

Optimal accentuation of a sentence involves accentuating a minimal set of words which in a given context suffices for understanding the entire sentence. We propose a model of the interpretation of incomplete or not entirely recognized utterances. Using this model, we determine which constituents of an utterance have to be accentuated given a certain context. 1. Optimal Accentuation Our basic as...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2015