Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye‐tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top–down information ‐ (knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence)  and bottom‐up cues  (distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom‐up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top‐down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication.     

Is it or isn’t it: Listeners make rapid use of prosody to infer speaker meanings

A visual world experiment examined the time course for pragmatic inferences derived from visual context and contrastive intonation contours. We used the construction It looks like an X pronounced with either (a) a H^* pitch accent on the final noun and a low boundary tone, or (b) a contrastive L + H^* pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support contrastive inference (e.g., It LOOKS_L+H*like a zebra_L-H%… (but it is not)). When the visual display contained a single related set of contrasting pictures (e.g. a zebra vs. a zebra-like animal), effects of LOOKS_L+H* emerged prior to the processing of phonemic information from the target noun. The results indicate that the prosodic processing is incremental and guided by contextually-supported expectations. Additional analyses ruled out explanations based on context-independent heuristics that might substitute for online computation of contrast.