Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
PLoS One. 2021 Mar 17;16(3):e0248388. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248388. eCollection 2021.
The results of a highly influential study that tested the predictions of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model suggest that (a) listeners use pragmatic reasoning in one-shot web-based referential communication games despite the artificial, highly constrained, and minimally interactive nature of the task, and (b) that RSA accurately captures this behavior. In this work, we reevaluate the contribution of the pragmatic reasoning formalized by RSA in explaining listener behavior by comparing RSA to a baseline literal listener model that is only driven by literal word meaning and the prior probability of referring to an object. Across three experiments we observe only modest evidence of pragmatic behavior in one-shot web-based language games, and only under very limited circumstances. We find that although RSA provides a strong fit to listener responses, it does not perform better than the baseline literal listener model. Our results suggest that while participants playing the role of the Speaker are informative in these one-shot web-based reference games, participants playing the role of the Listener only rarely take this Speaker behavior into account to reason about the intended referent. In addition, we show that RSA's fit is primarily due to a combination of non-pragmatic factors, perhaps the most surprising of which is that in the majority of conditions that are amenable to pragmatic reasoning, RSA (accurately) predicts that listeners will behave non-pragmatically. This leads us to conclude that RSA's strong overall correlation with human behavior in one-shot web-based language games does not reflect listener's pragmatic reasoning about informative speakers.
一项极具影响力的研究结果检验了理性言语行为（RSA）模型的预测，结果表明：（a）尽管任务具有人为的、高度受限和最小交互性的特点，听众在单次网络参考交流游戏中使用语用推理；（b）RSA 准确地捕捉到了这种行为。在这项工作中，我们通过将 RSA 形式化的语用推理与仅受字面意义和提及对象先验概率驱动的基线字面听众模型进行比较，重新评估 RSA 对解释听众行为的贡献。在三个实验中，我们仅观察到单次网络语言游戏中存在适度的语用行为，而且仅在非常有限的情况下才会出现。我们发现，尽管 RSA 对听众反应提供了很强的拟合，但它并不优于基线字面听众模型。我们的结果表明，虽然在这些单次网络参考游戏中，充当说话者角色的参与者具有信息量，但充当听众角色的参与者很少考虑说话者的这种行为，以推理预期的指称对象。此外，我们还表明，RSA 的拟合主要归因于非语用因素的组合，其中最令人惊讶的是，在大多数适合语用推理的条件下，RSA（准确地）预测听众将表现出非语用行为。这使我们得出结论，RSA 在单次网络语言游戏中与人类行为的高度相关性并不反映听众对信息丰富的说话者的语用推理。
