As a cognitive modeler, I love having these kind of theoretically-motivated empirical data to think about. Here, I wonder if we can unpack different possible causes of the ASD children’s behavior using something like the RSA model. We have distinct patterns of behavior to account for with details on the exact experimental context, and a really interesting separation of two steps involved in appropriately using scalar implicatures (where it seems like the ASD kids fail to cancel the implicature when they should).
Other thoughts:
(1) After reading the introduction and the difference between the ignorance implicature and the epistemic step, I now have a renewed appreciation for symbolic representation. In particular, the text descriptions of each of these made my head spin for awhile, while the symbolic representation was immediately comprehensible (and then I later worked out my own text description). My take: ignorance implicature not(believe(p)) = I don’t know if p is true”; epistemic step believe(not(p))= “I know p specifically is not true (as opposed to other things I might believe about p or whatever else)”.
(2) The basic issue with prior experimental work that H&al2017 highlight is that the Truth-Value Judgment Task (TVJT) is not the normal language comprehension process. This is because normal language comprehension involves you inferring the world from the utterance expressed. In the TVJT, in contrast, you’re given the world and asked if you would say a particular utterance - which is why RSA models capturing the TVJT cast it as an utterance endorsement process instead. But this highlights how important naturalistic conversational usage may be for getting at knowledge in populations where accessing that knowledge may be more fragile (like kids). The Partial Knowledge Task of H&al2017 is an example of this, where we see something like a naturalistic task in which participants have to use their implicit calculation (or not) of the implicature to make a judgment about the state of the world.
(3) Interestingly, something like the partial knowledge task setup has already been implemented in the RSA framework by Goodman & Stuhlmueller 2013, and addresses neurotypical adult behavior about when implicatures are and (importantly) aren’t computed, depending on speaker knowledge. Notably, this is where we see an ASD difference in the H&Al2017 studies — ASD kids don’t seem to use their ignorance implicature computation abilities here, and instead go ahead with the scalar implicature calculation.
I wonder how the H&al2017 behavior patterns play out in an RSA model. Would it have something to do with the recursive reasoning component if ASD kids don’t care about speaker knowledge? Or is there a way to keep the recursive social reasoning, but somehow skew probabilities to get this response behavior? (Especially since ASD Theory of Mind ability didn’t correlate with this response behavior.)
Goodman, N. D., & Stuhlmüller, A. (2013). Knowledge and implicature: Modeling language understanding as social cognition. Topics in Cognitive Science, 5(1), 173-184.
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