Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Miscommunication is often seen as a detrimental aspectof human communication. However, miscommunicationcan differ in cause as well as severity. What distinguishesa miscommunication where conversation partnerscontinue to put forth the effort from miscommunicationwhere conversation partners simply give up? In this eye-­‐‑tracking study, participants heard globally ambiguousstatements that were either a result of an experimentalerror or speaker underspecification; participants eitherreceived positive or negative feedback on theseambiguous trials. We found that negative feedback,paired with the reliability of the message, will impact theamount of processing effort a comprehender putsforth—specifically, listeners were less forgiving of errorswhen they were penalized and when speakers’instructions lacked effort. This suggests that languageusers weigh conversational contexts and outcomes aswell as linguistic content during communication.