Speaker knowledgeability and informativity inferences

Conversational partners expect each other to communicate rationally and cooperatively and to contribute relevant and informative utterances. Often however, listeners infer additional meaning over and above the explicit content of an utterance. The present study investigates how speaker characteristics influence inferencing. Experiment 1 (N=205) demonstrates that when produced by knowledgeable speakers utterances such as “the library walls are blue” are more likely to be understood as conveying that the library walls have changed. Experiment 2 (N=205) finds that these inferences are more likely to arise when produced by a speaker who is not typically very chatty; reticent speakers have a higher threshold of what is considered an appropriate conversational contribution. Taken together, the findings from these studies demonstrate that listeners have pervasive expectations of cooperativity and if conversational contributions fail to satisfy this then listeners will engage in sophisticated reasoning to reconcile the mismatch between expectations and input.