This Better Be Interesting: A Speaker's Decision to Speak Cues Listeners to Expect Informative Content.

In anticipating upcoming content, comprehenders are known to rely on real-world knowledge. This knowledge can be deployed directly in favor of upcoming content about typical situations (implying a transparent mapping between the world and what speakers say about the world). Such knowledge can also be used to estimate the likelihood of speech, whereby atypical situations are the ones newsworthy enough to merit reporting (i.e., a nontransparent mapping in which improbable situations yield likely utterances). We report four forced-choice studies (three preregistered) testing this distinction between situation knowledge and speech production likelihood. Comprehenders are shown to anticipate situation-atypical meanings more when guessing content (a) that a speaker announces (rather than thinks), (b) that is said out of the blue (rather than produced when prompted), and (c) that is addressed to a large audience (rather than a single listener). The findings contrast with prior work that emphasizes a comprehension bias in favor of typicality, and they highlight the need for comprehension models that incorporate expectations for informativity (as one of a set of inferred speaker goals) alongside expectations for content plausibility.

Expectations from relative clauses: Real-time coherence updates in discourse processing.

When processing a text, comprehenders use available cues to anticipate both upcoming content and the dependencies that comprise the structure of the growing discourse. In an eye-tracking while reading experiment, we test discourse updating in passages in which dependencies are implicit and the segments convey content that is not required to participate in any coherence-driven inference. This study provides strong evidence of comprehenders' ability to build implicit non-obligatory discourse structure in real time.