Variability in Pragmatic Inferencing

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In order to successfully communicate, speakers and hearers must use more than their knowledge of a common language. Often, understanding a speaker's intended meaning requires "reading between the lines" thereby enriching the linguistic meaning of what the speaker has said. For example, if a speaker says "I like some of my relatives," the hearer will likely understand her to have implied that she does not like all of them, even though her utterance is, strictly speaking, true if she does in fact like them. Previous work has shown that similarly enriched meanings can be computed extremely rapidly by hearers. This project examines in detail how speakers (or readers) arrive at such enriched meanings. What kinds of expectations about the speaker's choice of linguistic expressions does the hearer rely on? Does the hearer take into account the speaker's communicative goal or communicative abilities? Are there individual differences in the extent to which people can integrate more socially-based expectations about typical communicative behavior with linguistic meanings? And are there aspects of linguistic structure or context that make enriched meanings more accessible to the hearer/reader? This project will address some currently heated debates in theoretical linguistics, philosophy and cognitive psychology about the nature of enriched meanings and their relationship to purely linguistic meanings. It will provide the first study of individual differences in this domain, laying the groundwork for future studies with atypical populations (especially autistic individuals). The results are also likely of interest to computational linguists.