title: Knowledge and implicature: modeling language understanding as social cognition.
abstract: Is language understanding a special case of social cognition? To help evaluate this view, we can formalize it as the rational speech-act theory: Listeners assume that speakers choose their utterances approximately optimally, and listeners interpret an utterance by using Bayesian inference to "invert" this model of the speaker. We apply this framework to model scalar implicature ("some" implies "not all," and "N" implies "not more than N"). This model predicts an interaction between the speaker's knowledge state and the listener's interpretation. We test these predictions in two experiments and find good fit between model predictions and human judgments.
authors: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA. ngoodman@stanford.edu
authors: Noah D
authors: ND
authors: Goodman
authors: Andreas
authors: A
authors: Stuhlmüller
mesh_terms: D001499:Bayes Theorem; D032882:Comprehension; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans; D007257:Information Theory; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D019545:Intuition; D007600:Judgment; D019359:Knowledge; D007802:Language; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012660:Semantics; D012919:Social Behavior; D013067:Speech Perception