Mayn Alexandra, Loy Jia E, Demberg Vera
Department of Language Science and Technology, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Department of Computer Science, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Open Mind (Camb). 2025 Jan 20;9:89-120. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00180. eCollection 2025.
The cooperative principle states that communicators expect each other to be cooperative and adhere to rational conversational principles. Do listeners keep track of the reasoning sophistication of the speaker and incorporate it into the inferences they derive? In two experiments, we asked participants to interpret ambiguous messages in the reference game paradigm, which they were told were sent either by another adult or by a 4-year-old child. We found an effect of speaker identity: if sent by an adult, an ambiguous message was much more likely to be interpreted as an implicature, while if sent by a child, it was a lot more likely to be interpreted literally. We also observed substantial individual variability, which points to different beliefs and strategies among our participants. We discuss how these speaker effects can be modeled in the Rational Speech Act framework.
合作原则指出，沟通者期望彼此相互合作并遵守合理的会话原则。听众会留意说话者的推理复杂性并将其纳入自己得出的推理中吗？在两项实验中，我们要求参与者在指称博弈范式中解读模棱两可的信息，他们被告知这些信息要么是由另一位成年人发送的，要么是由一个4岁儿童发送的。我们发现了说话者身份的影响：如果是由成年人发送的，一条模棱两可的信息更有可能被解读为一种隐含意义，而如果是由儿童发送的，它更有可能被按字面意思解读。我们还观察到了很大的个体差异，这表明我们的参与者之间存在不同的信念和策略。我们讨论了如何在理性言语行为框架中对这些说话者效应进行建模。
