Rational speech act models of pragmatic reasoning in reference games

Human communication is almost always ambiguous, but it typically takes place in a context where this ambiguity can be resolved. A key part of this process of disambiguation comes from pragmatic reasoning about alternative messages that a speaker could have said in that context. Following previous work, we describe pragmatic inference as recursive reasoning – in which listeners reason about speakers and vice versa – using a “rational speech act” (RSA) model. We then systematically test the parameters and design decisions of this model through a series of ten experiments using one-shot reference-resolution games (N = 7,569). Such games present a valuable and tractable microcosm for studying broader questions about communication in context, and human behavior within them can be described using the RSA framework.