Adapting pragmatic interpretation in multiparty conversations
Mutual exclusivity inferences across speaker and context
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21819584 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edmundo Kronmüller (0000-0002-0413-0086, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), Ernesto Guerra (0000-0001-7403-5271, Centro de Recursos Educativos Avanzados) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language and Cognition (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1866-9808 • E-ISSN: 1866-9859 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/langcog.2026.10086 |
| OpenAlex | W4411207153 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
Listeners flexibly adapt utterance interpretation based on speaker characteristics, but less is known about how this works in multiparty conversations, particularly for pragmatic inferences like Mutual Exclusivity (MEI) – the tendency to map novel terms onto unnamed referents. MEI may reflect a flexible, speaker-sensitive process or a rigid default. This study tested whether listeners modulate MEI based on speaker-specific referential consistency in multiparty conversations. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted (Exp 1: N = 32, English; Exp 2: N = 44, Spanish), where participants followed instructions from two speakers. In experimental conditions, one speaker was consistent (reused labels), while the other was inconsistent (sometimes relabeled objects). Control conditions featured two consistent speakers. Results showed robust and early MEI across conditions. No speaker-specific adaptation occurred, but Experiment 1 showed context-general adaptation: exposure to an inconsistent speaker within a conversation reduced MEI overall. Findings suggest that in high-demand communicative contexts, MEI operates as a strong default heuristic, largely resistant to speaker-level inconsistency. Evidence for sensitivity to broader contextual reliability was observed in Experiment 1 but did not replicate in Experiment 2, leaving open whether MEI exhibits limited contextual flexibility or whether the initial finding reflected design-specific factors
Implicature · Inference · Linguistics · Pragmatics · Computer Science · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Philosophy · Artificial Intelligence
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Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension
Rapid Expectation Adaptation during Syntactic Comprehension
Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words
The Neural Integration of Speaker and Message
Taking Perspective in Conversation
Welcome to the Tidyverse
Simr
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Monolingual and bilingual children's use of the mutual exclusivity constraint
Toddlers link social and speech variation during word learning
Children's avoidance of lexical overlap
Predicting (variability of) context effects in language comprehension
The Effect of Foreign Accent and Speaking Rate on Native Speaker Comprehension
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |