Integrating Linguistic and Social Meaning in Imprecision Resolution

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Whenever we talk, we not only describe how things are, but also reveal information about who we are — our origin, identity, and personality. The proposed project aims at exploring how reasoning about a speaker's identity affects how we interpret what they are saying, and to what extent we should believe what they say. It pursues this question by focusing on how people interpret the meaning of a sentence depending on stereotypical features of a speaker — for example, on whether they look like, or sound like, a "Surfer Dude"; a "Nerd"; a "Valley Girl"; a Law School student; or some other socially recognizable stereotype. Investigating this issue will lead us to better understand not only how we exchange information in everyday life, but also, and most importantly, how the interpretation of sentences leads humans to ascribe more trust to members of some social groups as opposed to others, reflecting and reinforcing biases and preferences towards some people to the exclusion of others. This research will thus shed light on the implicit, and often unconscious, mechanisms whereby human communication reflects and reshapes society and culture; and to unveil potentially harmful and discriminatory consequences that these processes might have for people's lives. Drawing on experimental methods, this project explores how comprehenders integrate social information about speaker identity to compute the message conveyed by a sentence. It investigates this question through the lens of (im)precision, the phenomenon observed when speakers use words in a way that deviates from their literal meaning — such as when they describe an actual price of $312 as $300. Of particular interest is the question of how the interpretation of numerals is affected by the social stereotype embodied by a particular speaker. Previous work has shown that speakers using numerals precisely vs. imprecisely are associated with different sets of personality and identity traits: for example, someone describing the price as "$312" tends to be perceived as more articulate, studious, and pedantic than someone describing it, more liberally, as $300. This result motivates the hypothesis that, conversely, interlocutors reason about the social identity of a speaker to determine how precisely to interpret what they say: that is, that a sentence such as "The price is $300" uttered by a "nerdy, articulate" speaker is more likely to be interpreted as meaning exactly $300 than the same sentence uttered by a "chill, laid-back" one. We furthermore ask whether imprecise uses of the same sentence are more likely to be believed to be true when said by a "nerdy" speaker as opposed to a "chill" one. By bringing together the social, cognitive and descriptive underpinnings of human communication, this research builds new bridges between different approaches to the study of language, and deepens the integration of theories and traditions across linguistics and psychology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.