Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers exhibit variability in their choice between uncertaintyexpressions such as might and probably. Recent work hasfound that listeners cope with such variability by updating theirexpectations about how a specific speaker uses uncertainty ex-pressions when interacting with a single speaker. However, itis still unclear to what extent listeners form speaker-specificexpectations for multiple speakers and to what extent listenersare adapting to a situation independent of the speakers. Here,we take a first step towards answering these questions. In Ex-periment 1, listeners formed speaker-specific expectations af-ter being exposed to two speakers whose use of uncertaintyexpressions differed. In Experiment 2, listeners who were ex-posed to two speakers with identical use of uncertainty expres-sions formed considerably stronger expectations than in Exper-iment 1. This suggests that listeners form both speaker-specificand situation-specific expectations. We discuss the implica-tions of these results for theories of adaptation.