Scalar inferences are commonly assumed to involve both lit-eral semantic interpretation and social cognitive reasoning.However, the precise way to characterize listeners’ represen-tation of context - including the space of possible utterance al-ternatives as well as the space of possible conventional mean-ings associated with linguistic forms - is a matter of ongoingdebate. We report a partial replication of a scalar inferencepriming study by Rees and Bott (2018), introducing a novelbaseline condition against which to compare behavior acrossdifferent priming treatments. We also investigate the effectof raising participants’ awareness of communicatively strongeralternatives that explicitly encode an exhaustive meaning (e.g.some but not all with respect to some). Our results suggestthat exhaustive alternatives (which are ‘symmetric’ to canoni-cal alternatives) can modulate the availability and strength ofscalar inferences, and that semantic uncertainty is an indepen-dent channel through which scalar inferences are modulated.We discuss implications for theories of pragmatic competence.

The world's languages differ in how they order adjectives and nouns relative to each other. We ask whether cross-linguistic variation and systematicity in adjective-noun order can be explained by the iterated pressure for pragmatic referential communication. To this end, we apply the Rational Speech Act framework with an an iterated learning mechanism to study how cooperative pressures may shape typological regularities in referential communication. First, we show that the less informative adjectives are relative to nouns, the more likely they are to occur post-nominally. This is the case when informativeness is manipulated via the composition of the lexical space (i.e., changing the relative number of adjectives vs.~nouns that are available for reference), and via the inherent referential utility of adjectives vs.~nouns. Secondly, we show that under the assumption that nouns are on average more informative than adjectives, the model predicts a cross-linguistic distribution of ordering preferences that qualitatively resembles the empirical one, with these biases becoming further entrenched with iterated language use. Taken together, these results suggest a possible pathway for syntactic preferences to be calcified over time as the result of pragmatic communicative pressures on language.

Variation in the use of syntactic alternations has long been an explanatory target of language production theories. In this work, we test the predictions of several semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic theories of language use for the English dative alternation. We first experimentally test the role of incremental constituent informativity in the dative alternation, and find that contrary to information structural and RSA models of production, informativity has little effect on production preferences. We then more rigorously focus on accessibility effects, demonstrating that a lossy-context automatic policy can recover a key pattern of accessibility. Ultimately, we conclude that audience design pressures likely do not influence incremental production, but simply may affect planning at a broader scope.

We present a large-scale conceptual replication of an experiment that provided evidence of false consensus biases in legal interpretation: when reading a legal contract, individuals tend to over-estimate the extent to which others would agree with their interpretation of that contract (Solan, Rosenblatt, & Osherson 2008). Our results are consistent with this previous finding. We also observe substantial unexplained item-level variation in the extent to which individuals agree on contract interpretation, as well as unexplained variation in the extent to which the false consensus bias holds across different contexts. In a first step towards understanding the source(s) of this variability, we show that a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) with zero-shot prompting does not robustly predict the degree to which interpreters will exhibit consensus in a given context. However, performance improves when the model is exposed to data of the form collected in our experiment, suggesting a path forward for modeling and predicting variability in the interpretation of legally-relevant natural language.

Redundant modification in referring expression production varies both within language (e.g., English speakers produce more redundant color than size modifiers) and cross-linguistically (e.g., English speakers produce more redundant color modifiers than Spanish speakers). It is an open question whether these asymmetries are the result of asymmetries in the general referential utility of color and size modifiers or of incremental language processing pressures. Cross-linguistic investigations of redundant modification are important to this debate: similar cross-linguistic rates of redundant modification would suggest a strong role for general referential utility. In contrast, lower prevalence of redundant modification in languages with post-nominal modification suggests a strong role for incrementality. Here, we test whether differences in redundant adjective use are systematic for a particularly interesting language: Central Taurus Sign Language. As a language in its infancy, CTSL has no established conventions, and therefore provides us with a unique opportunity to explore how redundancy emerges in the initial stages of language formation. We evaluate different computational models of referring expression that each make different assumptions regarding the source of asymmetries in the production of redundant modifiers.