On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference.

Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., not happy to mean sad) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses. Here, we synthesize existing proposals via adjective subjectivity, which operationalizes the notion of loopholes for plausible deniability. We present experimental evidence that the degree of subjectivity of an adjective predicts the degree to which participants strengthen the negated adjective's meaning, but only if the adjective under consideration has an evaluatively-positive meaning. This finding indicates that speakers may intentionally use negation to leave themselves the option to retract the implicated face-threatening meaning if openly challenged.

Active Iterative Social Inference in Multi-Trial Signaling Games.

Human behavioral choices can reveal intrinsic and extrinsic decision-influencing factors. We investigate the inference of choice priors in situations of referential ambiguity. In particular, we use the scenario of signaling games and investigate to which extent study participants profit from actively engaging in the task. Previous work has revealed that speakers are able to infer listeners' choice priors upon observing ambiguity resolution. However, it was also shown that only a small group of participants was able to strategically construct ambiguous situations to create learning opportunities. This paper sets to address how prior inference unfolds in more complex learning scenarios. In Experiment 1, we examine whether participants accumulate evidence about inferred choice priors across a series of four consecutive trials. Despite the intuitive simplicity of the task, information integration turns out to be only partially successful. Integration errors result from a variety of sources, including transitivity failure and recency bias. In Experiment 2, we investigate how the ability to actively construct learning scenarios affects the success of prior inference and whether the iterative settings improve the ability to choose utterances strategically. The results suggest that full task engagement and explicit access to the reasoning pipeline facilitates the invocation of optimal utterance choices as well as the accurate inference of listeners' choice priors.

Learning about others: Modeling social inference through ambiguity resolution.

Bayesian accounts of social cognition successfully model the human ability to infer goals and intentions of others on the basis of their behavior. In this paper, we extend this paradigm to the analysis of ambiguity resolution during brief communicative exchanges. In a reference game experimental setup, we observed that participants were able to infer listeners' preferences when analyzing their choice of object given referential ambiguity. Moreover, a subset of speakers was able to strategically choose ambiguous over unambiguous utterances in an epistemic manner, although a different group preferred unambiguous utterances. We show that a modified Rational Speech Act model well-approximates the data of both the inference of listeners' preferences and their utterance choices. In particular, the observed preference inference is modeled by Bayesian inference, which computes posteriors over hypothetical, behavior-influencing inner states of conversation partners-such as their knowledge, beliefs, intentions, or preferences-after observing their utterance-interpretation behavior. Utterance choice is modeled by anticipating social information gain, which we formalize as the expected knowledge change, when choosing a particular utterance and watching the listener's response. Taken together, our results demonstrate how social conversations allow us to (sometimes strategically) learn about each other when observing interpretations of ambiguous utterances.

Resolving uncertainty in plural predication.

Plural predications (e.g., "the boxes are heavy") are common sources of ambiguity in everyday language, allowing both distributive and collective interpretations (e.g., the boxes each are heavy vs. the boxes together are heavy). This paper investigates the role of context in the disambiguation of plural predication. We address the key phenomenon of "stubborn distributivity," whereby certain predicates (e.g., big, tall) are claimed to lack collective interpretations altogether. We first validate a new methodology for measuring the interpretation of plural predications. Using this method, we then analyze naturally-occurring plural predications from corpora. We find a role of context, but no evidence of a distinct class of predicates that resists collective interpretations. We further explore the role of context in our final experiments, showing that both the predictability of properties and the knowledgeability of the speaker affect disambiguation. This suggests a pragmatic account of how ambiguous plural predications are interpreted. In particular, stubbornly distributive predicates are so because the collective properties they name are unpredictable, or unstable, in most contexts; this unpredictability results in a noisy collective interpretation, something speakers and listeners recognize as ineffective for communicating efficiently about their world. We formalize the pragmatics of utterance disambiguation within the Bayesian Rational Speech Act framework.

Syntactic Complexity Effects in Sentence Production: A Reply to MacDonald, Montag, and Gennari (2016).

In our article, "Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production" (Scontras, Badecker, Shank, Lim, & Fedorenko, ), we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local syntactic dependency. MacDonald et al. () have argued that the results of our investigation provide little new information on the topic. We disagree. Examining the production of subject versus object extractions in two constructions across two experimental paradigms-relative clauses in Experiment 1 and wh-questions in Experiment 2-we found a strikingly similar pattern: reliable differences in latency and word durations, as well as in rates of disfluencies, signaling a greater cost associated with planning and uttering the syntactically more complex object extractions. MacDonald et al. reject that interpretation, namely that the differences we observed in the production of subject versus object extractions demonstrate asymmetric production difficulties. Here we address the concerns they raise by clarifying confusion and presenting novel experimental evidence in support of our original claims.

Heritage language and linguistic theory.

This paper discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the language of their speech community). To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to the study of linguistic competence more broadly defined, we present a series of case studies on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage speakers, together with the broader theoretical questions they inform. We consider the reorganization of morphosyntactic feature systems, the reanalysis of atypical argument structure, the attrition of the syntax of relativization, and the simplification of scope interpretations; these phenomena implicate diverging trajectories and outcomes in the development of heritage speakers. The case studies also have practical and methodological implications for the study of multilingualism. We conclude by discussing more general concepts central to linguistic inquiry, in particular, complexity and native speaker competence.

Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production.

Syntactic complexity effects have been investigated extensively with respect to comprehension (e.g., Demberg & Keller, 2008; Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gordon et al., 2001, 2004; Grodner & Gibson, 2005; King & Just, 1991; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005; Lewis et al., 2006; McElree et al., 2003; Wanner & Maratsos, 1978). According to one prominent class of accounts (experience-based accounts; e.g., Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008; Gennari & MacDonald, 2008, 2009; Wells et al., 2009), certain structures cause comprehension difficulty due to their scarcity in the language. But why are some structures less frequent than others? In two elicited-production experiments we investigated syntactic complexity effects in relative clauses (Experiment 1) and wh-questions (Experiment 2) varying in whether or not they contained non-local dependencies. In both experiments, we found reliable durational differences between subject-extracted structures (which only contain local dependencies) and object-extracted structures (which contain nonlocal dependencies): Participants took longer to begin and produce object-extractions. Furthermore, participants were more likely to be disfluent in the object-extracted constructions. These results suggest that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering the more syntactically complex, object-extracted structures, and that this cost manifests in the form of longer durations and disfluencies. Although the precise nature of this cost remains to be determined, these effects provide one plausible explanation for the relative rarity of object-extractions: They are more costly to produce.

Comparing pluralities.

What does it mean to compare sets of objects along a scale, for example by saying "the men are taller than the women"? We explore comparison of pluralities in two experiments, eliciting comparison judgments while varying the properties of the members of each set. We find that a plurality is judged as "bigger" when the mean size of its members is larger than the mean size of the competing plurality. These results are incompatible with previous accounts, in which plural comparison is inferred from many instances of singular comparison between the members of the sets (Matushansky & Ruys, 2006). Our results suggest the need for a type of predication that ascribes properties to plural entities, not just individuals, based on aggregate statistics of their members. More generally, these results support the idea that sets and their properties are actively represented as single units.