You are invited to attend a Program in Linguistics Lecture on Tuesday, December 10 th : Understanding ambiguity Gregory Scontras Department of Language Science University of California, Irvine Tuesday, December 10, 2024 4 :30- 6 :00 p.m. 1-S-5 Green Hall Ambiguity is everywhere, yet it rarely leads to catastrophes in communication. In this talk, I present a computational cognitive model of the social reasoning that we perform when resolving ambiguities. I motivate the model on the basis of a case study in which young children perform quite differently from adults when it comes to understanding utterances with multiple potential meanings. There, we see that pragmatic factors may play a larger role than grammatical processing factors in explaining children’s non-adult-like behavior, and the computational model offers a hypothesis as to why that’s so: pragmatic factors have a larger impact on the truth-value judgment task that researchers use to investigate young children’s language understanding. I then provide additional support for the proposed model of ambiguity resolution, first from adult behavioral experiments, then from the largest-of-its-kind annotated corpus of naturally-occurring ambiguities. Finally, I show how the proposed view of ambiguity resolution as recursive social reasoning offers additional insight into the benefits of having ambiguity in language: by observing how others resolve ambiguity, we learn about the private thoughts they use to do so. Gregory Scontras is a linguist and cognitive scientist specializing in semantics, pragmatics, and their intersection with human cognition. He received his B.A. in linguistics and in philosophy from Boston University, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard. Scontras was a post-doctoral scholar in the Computation & Cognition Lab at Stanford Psychology. In 2016, he joined the University of California, Irvine, to found the Department of Language Science, where he now directs [ https://www.langsci.uci.edu/scontras/meaning/ | the meaning lab ] . Scontras’s research uses a range of qualitative, experimental, and computational methods, applied to a diverse set of cross-linguistic data — all in service of understanding the mental representations of our speech and the computational system that manipulates them. Ongoing projects investigate the cross-linguistic semantics of measurement and degrees, the development and maintenance of complexity in unbalanced (heritage) bilingualism, the communicative pressures driving cross-linguistic ordering regularities, and the pragmatic reasoning speakers engage in to arrive at meaning in context. ***** Please forward this announcement to faculty and students in your department.