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Knowledge and Implicature: Modeling Language Understanding as Social Cognition
Author(s) -
Goodman Noah D.,
Stuhlmüller Andreas
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
topics in cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.191
H-Index - 56
eISSN - 1756-8765
pISSN - 1756-8757
DOI - 10.1111/tops.12007
Subject(s) - implicature , utterance , inference , cognition , computer science , interpretation (philosophy) , bayesian inference , psychology , cognitive psychology , bayesian probability , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , linguistics , pragmatics , philosophy , neuroscience , programming language
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.