Indirectly learning from language

Chestnut, E. K., & Markman, E. M. (2018). “Girls are as good as boys at math” implies that boys are probably better: A study of expressions of gender equality. Cognitive Science, 42, 2229—2249.

Kidd, C., White, K. S., & Aslin, R. N. (2011). Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers’ referential intentions. Developmental Science, 14, 925—934.

• The last few classes, we have been discussing how speakers structure their language to communicate their intended meaning and how listeners who reason about these intentions can get a lot of learning done. However, speakers can also “leak” unintended information into their language, and listeners can learn from this information too. The two articles for this seminar discuss two such cases. When you read them, think about whether the models we have been working with account for these data, could be extended to account for this data, or whether we need something altogether different to explain them.

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