On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference.

Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., to mean ) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses.

Active Iterative Social Inference in Multi-Trial Signaling Games.

Human behavioral choices can reveal intrinsic and extrinsic decision-influencing factors. We investigate the inference of choice priors in situations of referential ambiguity. In particular, we use the scenario of signaling games and investigate to which extent study participants profit from actively engaging in the task.

Learning about others: Modeling social inference through ambiguity resolution.

Bayesian accounts of social cognition successfully model the human ability to infer goals and intentions of others on the basis of their behavior. In this paper, we extend this paradigm to the analysis of ambiguity resolution during brief communicative exchanges. In a reference game experimental setup, we observed that participants were able to infer listeners' preferences when analyzing their choice of object given referential ambiguity.

Resolving uncertainty in plural predication.

Plural predications (e.g., "the boxes are heavy") are common sources of ambiguity in everyday language, allowing both distributive and collective interpretations (e.

Syntactic Complexity Effects in Sentence Production: A Reply to MacDonald, Montag, and Gennari (2016).

In our article, "Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production" (Scontras, Badecker, Shank, Lim, & Fedorenko, ), we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local syntactic dependency. MacDonald et al. () have argued that the results of our investigation provide little new information on the topic.

Heritage language and linguistic theory.

This paper discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the language of their speech community). To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to the study of linguistic competence more broadly defined, we present a series of case studies on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage speakers, together with the broader theoretical questions they inform. We consider the reorganization of morphosyntactic feature systems, the reanalysis of atypical argument structure, the attrition of the syntax of relativization, and the simplification of scope interpretations; these phenomena implicate diverging trajectories and outcomes in the development of heritage speakers.

Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production.

Syntactic complexity effects have been investigated extensively with respect to comprehension (e.g., Demberg & Keller, 2008; Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gordon et al.

Comparing pluralities.

What does it mean to compare sets of objects along a scale, for example by saying "the men are taller than the women"? We explore comparison of pluralities in two experiments, eliciting comparison judgments while varying the properties of the members of each set. We find that a plurality is judged as "bigger" when the mean size of its members is larger than the mean size of the competing plurality. These results are incompatible with previous accounts, in which plural comparison is inferred from many instances of singular comparison between the members of the sets (Matushansky & Ruys, 2006).