When Arabic speakers write in their dialect, they have the choice of using either the standard Arabic script or the non-standard Roman script. Arabizi writing is a new emerging writing system that Arabic speakers use to type their dialects utilizing Roman characters. Although Arabizi is not standardized, people have developed an efficient way to communicate through it. One phenomenon that emerged with this new system is vowel dropping. In this paper, we approach this phenomenon from the perspective of communicative efficiency. We study the informativity of short and long spellings of words and investigate whether the predictability of the word in certain contexts impacts whether the vowel is dropped in that word.

Recent research has proposed that adjective form (i.e., whether adjectives typically occur before or after the nouns they modify) interacts with considerations from efficient communication to determine the rate at which we use adjectives to resolve reference to objects. According to this efficiency hypothesis, languages with pre-nominal adjectives use modifying adjectives at a higher rate in an effort to aid incremental reference resolution. We test this broad typological prediction in a large-scale corpus analysis of 74 languages, finding that languages that favor pre-nominal adjectives indeed do exhibit higher rates of adjectival modification than languages that favor post-nominal adjectives.

In Mandarin Chinese, abbreviation happens commonly to compound words across different syntactic categories. What is the motivation behind this shortening of words? This paper presents an investigation of this phenomenon from an information-theoretic point of view. A corpus study was con- ducted to measure the average amount of information contained in the full (long) form and the abbreviated (short) form of words given certain contexts. The amount of information was then compared between the long and short forms of a word, revealing that the short one usually contains less information, and therefore is more likely to be used in more predictive contexts. This result indicates that speakers of Chinese can choose to use shorter words when the context is more predictive, in accordance with considerations of efficiency.

Traditional investigations of quantifier-negation scope ambiguity (e.g., Everyone didn't go, meaning that no one went or not everyone went) have focused on universal quantifiers, and how ambiguity in interpretation preferences is due to the logical operators themselves and the syntactic relation between those operators. We investigate a broader range of quantifiers in combination with negation, observing differences in interpretation preferences both across quantifiers and also within the same quantifier (confirmed by corpus analysis). To explain this variation, we extend a computational cognitive model that incorporates pragmatic context-related factors, and which previously accounted for every-negation, to predict human interpretation preferences also for some and no. We evaluate the model's predictions against human judgments for quantifier-negation utterances, finding a strong qualitative and quantitative match when the listener has particular expectations about the world in which the utterance occurs. These results suggest that pragmatic factors can explain variation in interpretation preferences.

Adjective ordering preferences (e.g., big brown bag vs. brownbig bag) are robustly attested in English and many unrelatedlanguages (Dixon, 1982). Scontras, Degen, and Goodman(2017) showed that adjective subjectivity is a robust predictorof ordering preferences in English: less subjective adjectivesare preferred closer to the modified noun. In a follow-up tothis empirical finding, Simoniˇc (2018) and Scontras, Degen,and Goodman (to appear) claim that pressures from success-ful reference resolution and the hierarchical structure of mod-ification explain subjectivity-based ordering preferences. Weprovide further support for this claim using large-scale sim-ulations of reference scenarios, together with an empirically-motivated adjective semantics. In the vast majority of cases,subjectivity-based adjective orderings yield a higher probabil-ity of successful reference resolution.

Investigations of scope ambiguity resolution suggest that childbehavior differs from adult behavior, with children strugglingto access inverse scope interpretations. For example, childrenoften fail to accept Every horse didn’t succeed to mean not allthe horses succeeded. Current accounts of children’s scope be-havior involve both pragmatic and processing factors. Inspiredby these accounts, we use the Rational Speech Act frameworkto articulate a formal model that yields a more precise, ex-planatory, and predictive description of the observed develop-mental behavior.

Generalizations are a fundamental linguistic tool for efficiently passing along information. To interpret the intended strength of a generalization, listeners rely on prior knowledge. Experienced and inexperienced listeners may interpret the same generalization differently, potentially leading to miscommunication. Speakers could mitigate such miscommunication by avoiding generalizations that inexperienced listeners are likely to misinterpret. However, experienced speakers may struggle to understand the perspective of an inexperienced listener. The present study examined whether experienced speakers adjust their use of generalizations based on the expertise of their intended audience. Results showed that any such adjustments are minimal and insufficient to avoid miscommunication as operationally defined. Future research may clarify the practical impact of such miscommunication by examining how generalizations are used in relation to speakers’ and listeners’ goals.

Generic statements, such as “mosquitoes fly” and “mosquitoes carry malaria,” are remarkable in that they are an intuitive and readily understood means of conveying knowledge, and yet their implied prevalence---the specific quantification they convey---can vary widely. This variability may lead to miscommunication, with speakers using generic statements flexibly and listeners rigidly interpreting them as implying near universal prevalence (Cimpian et al., 2010). However, recent research found that listeners with applicable prior knowledge interpret generic statements flexibly (Tessler & Goodman, 2019b). The evident importance of prior knowledge suggests that expertise may impact how people interpret generic statements. We investigated whether experts and novices systematically differ in the way they interpret generic statements, using the esport League of Legends as a cultural microcosm. As hypothesized, experts interpreted generic statements more flexibly than novices did, and novices tended to assume generic statements applied more broadly than experts did.

Traditionally, linguists have treated ambiguity as a bug in the communication system, something to be avoided or ex-plained away. More recent research has taken notice of the efficiency ambiguity affords us. The current work identifies anadditional benefit of using ambiguous language: the extra information we gain from observing how our listeners resolveambiguity. We propose that language users learn about each others private knowledge by observing how they resolveambiguity. If language does not do the job of specifying the information necessary for full interpretation, then listenersare left to draw on their private knowledgeopinions, beliefs, and preferencesto fill in the gaps; by observing how listenersfill those gaps in, speakers learn about the private knowledge of their listeners. We implement this hypothesis as a com-putational model within the Rational Speech Act framework. We then test our hypothesis by using the model to predictbehavioral data from naive participants.