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Research on typicality has disclosed seemingly contradictory patterns in comprehenders and speakers: typical content is easier for comprehenders to process (Kamide et al. 2003) but is less frequently produced by speakers (Brown & Dell 1987). However, recent work shows that comprehenders also pay attention to speakers’ production preferences (e.g. Rohde et al. 2021, 2022) – the more the speaker's role as an intentional communicator is emphasised, the more comprehenders expect contributions about non-typical content, i.e., content that is cooperatively informative (Authors, submitted). Here, we ask whether children reason about speakers’ informativity goals in adult-like ways. If child-directed speech favours mention of typical events and properties, particularly at younger ages (Bergey et al. 2021), children may expect speech to transparently reflect what the world is like. In ongoing data collection, participants (ages 5-11) complete sentences about what is found at different locations. A bare condition only mentions the location (e.g. “At the beach, there’s _____”); a visible speaker condition uses first person and adds a photo of a speaker (“I’m at the beach, and there’s _____”). So far, results (N=111) show that children expect more informative completions with the visible speaker, with a trend towards more adult-like behaviour as age increases.

Loy et al. (2019) showed that listeners are more likely to make an early commitment to the semantically-allowed meaning of ‘some’ as ‘all’ if it follows disfluent ‘uh’ in a context where larger values are socially undesirable (I ate, uh, some biscuits). Here, we varied the context to one where smaller values are socially undesirable interpretations of ‘some’. In two experiments, we recorded participants’ mouse movements in a web-based task as they heard fluent and disfluent utterances in a job interview context (I have, uh, some qualifications) and clicked on one of four images corresponding to specific interpretations of ‘some’. Here, disfluency has the opposite effect, reducing the value participants associate with 'some': We found that participants are more likely to select images corresponding to one, or zero, qualifications, following disfluent utterances. However, their mouse movements show they are quick to commit to one qualification (experiment 1) and slow to commit to zero (experiment 2). This suggests that social context and manner of speech can combine to affect the interpretation of ‘some’ as an utterance unfolds. Extending its meaning to ‘one’ is relatively easy, but overwriting it with ‘zero’ (in effect, deciding that a speaker is lying) is more demanding.

This is a pre-registration for a study in a series of studies looking at expectations for informativity in language processing. Comprehenders rely on real-world knowledge when guessing upcoming content. For example, taking a sip from the waterfall is more expected than taking a sip from the transmitter (Kutas & Hillyard 1980). By contrast, speakers tend to omit typical content in favour of newsworthy content: they include an optional instrument more often when it is atypical, favouring the production of stab with an ice pick over stab with a knife (Brown & Dell 1987). These findings are taken to reflect constraints on cooperative communication whereby speakers’ contributions are expected to be appropriately informative and relevant (Grice 1975). If comprehenders are rational and are sensitive to speakers’ production preferences, these should also bear upon their predictions about upcoming content: that is, they should expect the kind of content that cooperative speakers are likely to mention, rather than just the kind of content that is likely to be the case in the real world. In our first study in this project (Experiment 1), we elicited sentence completions via a sentence continuation task as an index of comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming material (Taylor 1953). We manipulated the salience of the speaker and showed that the more aware participants are of the speaker as an intentional communicator, the more informative they expect the speaker’s contribution to be. In the second study, we further found that this expectation for informativity is malleable depending on properties of the speaker (Grodner & Sedivy 2011). Participants were familiarised with two different speakers in an initial exposure phase: one speaker routinely made uninformative utterances, and one produced utterances that were highly informative. In the following sentence continuation task, participants expected more informative utterances from the high-informativity speaker compared to the low-informativity speaker. This third study will look at another aspect of how we might modulate our expectations for informativity: do comprehenders have different expectations for how informative a speaker's contribution will be when the addressee is a child compared to an adult? The study will use the same paradigm as the most speaker-salient condition in Experiment 1, which consisted of pictures of different (adult) speakers on the phone, with utterances to be completed embedded in a speech bubble.

Conversational partners expect each other to communicate rationally and cooperatively with relevant and informative utterances. Occasionally, however, speakers produce seemingly trivial utterances which may violate our expectations of informativity. In adults, we see trivial utterances interpreted as conveying additional information, e.g., implying that the situation has changed in some way. These inferences are more likely when a speaker is deemed as knowledgeable. Here we ask how children deal with seemingly trivial utterances from knowledgeable and unknowledgeable speakers. Preliminary findings (data collection ongoing) suggest that children are less sensitive to speaker knowledge than adults and draw fewer inferences from trivial utterances.

Listeners’ interpretations of an ambiguous word like the scalar quantifier ‘some’ is shown to be contextual (Breheny, Katsos, & Williams, 2006; Politzer-Ahles and Husband,2018), varying from a semantic meaning ‘some and possibly all’ to a pragmatically strengthened meaning ‘some and possibly all’. Loy et al. (2019) further explored that the interpretations of ‘some’ depends on listeners’ reasoning of a speaker’s manner of speech. They found that, within a context where interpreting ‘some’ semantically (to a larger some-and-possibly-all value) is socially undesirable (‘I ate some oreos’), listeners were more likely to make an early commitment to a semantic interpretation (‘I ate some and possibly all oreos’) when the speaker is disfluent (‘I ate, uh, some oreos’). However, listeners no longer associate disfluency with the semantic interpretation of ‘some’ when we varied the social context in one of our mouse-tracking experiments (presented in XPRAG 2022).

This study investigates under which circumstances speakers produce additive presupposition triggers such as too to understand what contexts (if any) necessitate their presence and how sensitive they are to discourse factors. Additives have been argued to be obligatory (in affirmative sentences) as soon as their presupposition is met in the context.

The current project aims to investigate how the at-issue status of clauses impacts the processing of these clauses, as well as subsequent discourse. To test this, we designed two experiments, each investigating this for a different type of main clause-subordinate clause construction: Experiment 1 Sentences containing an adverbial clause that starts with 'after' Experiment 2 Relative clause constructions: subject- and object-modifying Experiment 1 is a self-paced reading experiment which will be conducted on sentences containing adverbial clauses. In these sentences, the adverbial clause is not expected to be at-issue, and the main clause is. We will also test how content that follows these sentences is processed differently based on whether it is coreferential with the at-issue content (main clause) or the not-at-issue content (adverbial clause). For example, the reading times of below bracketed clauses will be compared: (1a) [subordinate clause, low at-issue potential] After [they had dinner at a French bistro,] they went to a violin concert. (1b) [main clause, high at-issue potential] After they went to a violin concert, [they had dinner at French bistro.] In the sentence that follows these, the bracketed clause content will be coreferential with either the subordinate clause content (1a), or the main clause content (1b): (2) It was [a very small cozy restaurant.] In experiment 2, we want to find out how clauses that are ambiguous with respect to their at-issue status, object-modifying relative clauses, are processed differently compared to clauses that have a clear at-issue status, subject-modifying relative clauses (not-at-issue) and the main clauses that embed these (at-issue). Furthermore, we aim to investigate how content that follows above-mentioned relative clause constructions is processed differently based on whether its content is coreferential with at-issue content, not-at-issue content, or content that is ambiguous with respect to its at-issue status. For example, the reading times of below bracketed clauses will be compared: (3a) [subject-modifying relative clause, low at-issue potential] My dad, who [was having a snack of chips and dip,] opened a bottle of wine for my uncle. (3b) [object-modifying relative clause, medium at-issue potential] My dad opened a bottle of wine for my uncle, who [was having a snack of chips and dip.] (3c) [main clause that embeds a subject-modifying relative clause, high at-issue potential] My dad, who opened a bottle of wine for my uncle, [was having a snack of chips and dip.] In the sentence that follows these, the bracketed clause content will be coreferential with either the subject-modifying relative clause content (3a), the object-modifying relative clause content (3b), or the main clause content (3c): It was [tortilla chips with guacemole.]

Communication depends in part on the hope that people will tell us things we’re interested in with language providing a channel by which speakers can convey, among other things, newsworthy and informative messages. Despite this, research often emphasises the role of predictability, showing that comprehenders make fast and sophisticated use of knowledge about typical situations to shape their expectations about upcoming words in fine-grained and context-driven ways. This new study contrasts these two dimensions, distinguishing knowledge about situation plausibility from knowledge about what people actually choose to talk about.

This fourth registration aims to fill in gaps that were identified after carrying out experiments affiliated with the third registration part of this project: 'Processing at-issue content part 3: disentangling recency from clause type (again)'. I will first review the findings of two experiments of the third registration (experiment 5 & 6) in order to set up the goals of the current registration. These self-paced reading experiments - experiment 5 with sentences containing an adverbial clause that starts with 'after', and experiment 6 with subject- and object-modifying relative clause constructions - were designed to investigate which factor had a greater impact on the at-issue status of the individual clauses of above-mentioned sentence types: clause type, or recency. This was tested by measuring how fast a {continuation sentence} was processed that had content that was coreferential with content present in only one of the clauses in the sentence it followed. In experiment 5 this was done by comparing the reading times of {continuation sentences} in two conditions: one in which the {continuation} had content that was coreferential with content that was coreferential with content in a sentence-final adverbial clause (1a), and one in which the {continuation} had content that was coreferential with content in a sentence-early matrix clause (1b): Experiment 5 - adverbial clauses: (1a) They went to a violin concert after they had dinner at a French bistro. It was {a very small cosy restaurant.} (1b) They had dinner at a French bistro after they went to a violin concert. It was {a very small cosy restaurant.} In experiment 6 this was done by comparing the reading times of {continuation sentences} in three conditions: one in which the {continuation} had content that was coreferential with content in a sentence-early matrix clause (2a), one in which the {continuation} had content that was coreferential with content in a sentence early relative clause (2b), and one in which the {continuation} had content that was coreferential with content in a sentence-final matrix clause (2c): Experiment 6 - relative clauses: (2a) My dad opened a bottle of wine for my uncle, who was having a snack of chips and dip. It was {a dry white wine from Italy.} (2b) My dad, who opened a bottle of wine for my uncle, was having a snack of chips and dip. It was {a dry white wine from Italy.} (2c) My dad, who was having a snack of chips and dip, opened a bottle of wine for my uncle. It was {a dry white wine from Italy.} Experiment 5 yielded no significant differences in reading times for the continuations, leaving the question as to which factor - recency or clause type - is more important in assigning at-issue status to clauses, open. In experiment 6 we found that the continuation in (2c) was read faster than in (2b), but no differences were found between (2a) and any of the other conditions. This also means we cannot draw any conclusions about which factor - recency or clause type - is more important in assigning at-issue status to clauses, because in the fastest condition (2c), the {continuation} connected with a clause that was both a main clause and recent; both of these contribute to making said clause more at-issue. In fact, so far across all studies we have conducted, all instances where we found a continuation to be read significantly faster were when it was coreferential with a clause that was a recent matrix clause, or a recent relative clause (object-modifying). The current follow-up studies aim to investigate if clause type contributes to the at-issue status of clauses when these clauses are not recent. I.e., we will hold constant position (sentence-early), to try and isolate an effect of clause type. Theories predict that matrix clauses can always be at-issue, also when they are sentence-early. Our experiments so far have not been able to evidence this. Therefore, we have designed two follow-up experiments in which the at-issue status of a sentence-early matrix clause is compared to the at-issue status of other clauses in this same position that theories predict are not likely to be at-issue. In experiment 7 this will be done by comparing the reading times of {continuations} when their content is coreferential either with content in a sentence-early matrix clause (3b) or a sentence-early adverbial clause (3a): Experiment 7 - adverbial clauses: (3a) After they had dinner at a French bistro, they went to a violin concert. It was {a very small cosy restaurant.} (3b) They had dinner at a French bistro after they went to a violin concert. It was {a very small cosy restaurant.} In experiment 8 this will be done by comparing the reading times of {continuations} when their content is coreferential either with content in a sentence-early matrix clause (4b) or a main clause that is followed by another main clause (i.e.: two free-standing units/sentences). The point is to compare the same content when the intervening material is either a subordinate clause, leaving the matrix clause accessible, or a free-standing sentence, making the main clause before that harder to access. The goal for the condition with two main clauses, was to have them both answer the same Question Under Discussion of 'what was happening?', which is compatible with a coordinating relation. This makes this first main clause less accessible (not-at-issue): Experiment 8 - relative clauses: (4a) My mom opened a bottle of wine for my uncle. He was having a snack of chips and dip. It was {a dry white wine from Italy.} (4b) My mom opened a bottle of wine for my uncle, who was having a snack of chips and dip. It was {a dry white wine from Italy.} For experiment 8, the items underwent some additional changes. In the condition where there are two main clauses (4a), the wh-pronoun is replaced by a personal pronoun. To make sure that this pronoun can only refer to one of the participants in the preceding main clause, we made sure that all items contained at least one participant with an explicitly clear gender, so that the pronoun always only had one possible referent. This was done to avoid any slowed-down reading times possibly arising because of issues with ambiguous pronoun resolution.

We learn about the world through language. Communication is an inherently complicated process. On the surface it seems simple enough to take the sounds we hear and map those onto words and then onto meaning. However, listeners often go beyond the surface form of an utterance and compute additional meaning (Grice, 1975). That is, they compute pragmatic inferences. For example, if I say in conversation that there is a “yellow banana” this would give rise to the inference that there is another non-yellow banana present (Sedivy, 2003). Since the colour of a banana is typically rather mundane, as listeners we intuit why the speaker has chosen to specify the colour. Pragmatic inferences rely on the expectation that interlocutors communicate rationally and cooperatively. We have an expectation for conversational contributions to add something to the discourse (Rohde, Futrell, & Lucas, 2021). In the studies registered here we examine inferences that arise from mundane content at the propositional level. For example, if a speaker proffers a mundane utterance like “I saw that the library walls are blue” when talking about a location they are familiar with, a listener is licensed to look for a communicative reason for such a mundane contribution to the conversation (see Kravtchenko & Demberg 2015). Study 1 will examine how speaker characteristics influence the inferences drawn by listeners. Study 2 will examine how highlighting the speaker's intention to be communicative influences the inferences drawn by listeners.