Knowledge and Implicature: Modeling Language Understanding as Social Cognition

Is language understanding a special case of social cognition? To help evaluate this view, we can formalize it as the rational speech-act theory: Listeners assume that speakers choose their utterances approximately optimally, and listeners interpret an utterance by using Bayesian inference to invert this model of the speaker. We apply this framework to model scalar implicature (some implies not all, and N implies not more than N). This model predicts an interaction between the speaker's knowledge state and the listener's interpretation. We test these predictions in two experiments and find good fit between model predictions and human judgments.