To me, this is a beautifully accessible review article for the probabilistic pragmatics approach, as implemented in RSA. (Figure 1 in particular made me happy – these helpful visuals really are worth it, though I know it’s hard to get them together just right.) This review article definitely gets me wondering more about how to use RSA for language acquisition (especially when it discusses bounded cognition).
In particular, what’s the (potential) difference between a child’s approximation of Bayesian inference and an adult’s approximation? How much can be captured by this mental computation being pretty good but the units over which inference is operating being immature (e.g., utterance alternatives, meaning options, priors)? For instance, how worthwhile is it to try and capture child behavior on different pragmatic phenomena by assuming adult-like Bayesian inference but non-adult-like units that inference operates over?
Scontras & Pearl 2021 did this a little for quantifier-scope interpretation, but those child data were from five-year-olds, who are known to be pretty adult-like for non-pragmatic things. What about younger kids? And of course, what about other pragmatic phenomena that we have child data for?
No comments:
Post a Comment