Academic interests
Experimental pragmatics.
Background
- PhD Linguistics (2025), University of Edinburgh
- MSc Linguistics and English Language (2018), University of Edinburgh
- BA (Hons) English Language and Linguistics (2017), University of Kent
Positions
Representative for temporary academic staff at the Faculty Board 2026.
Tags:
Linguistics,
Pragmatics,
Experimental Linguistics
Publications
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Rees, Alice; Reksnes, Vilde Regine Stugaard & Rohde, Hannah
(2026).
Why are you telling me this? The availability and timing of triviality-driven inferences.
Journal of Memory and Language.
ISSN 0749-596X.
148,
p. 104741–104741.
doi:
10.1016/j.jml.2026.104741.
Full text in Research Archive
Show summary
Part of successful communication involves recognising the purpose of, or the intentions underlying, what speakers choose to say. Often, such pragmatic inferences are studied with an emphasis on informativity. The present work however moves beyond the types of inferences typically studied in prior work and instead investigates inferences from more naturalistic utterances, specifically those whose triviality may invite addressees to reason about why a speaker would have made such a discourse contribution. We present four studies (total N = 777) using offline and online methods to investigate how and when listeners derive relevance inferences from trivial utterances. We manipulate speaker knowledge, speaker style, and linguistic properties of the utterances to show that, even in the absence of explicit emphasis cues, trivial utterances such as “the library walls are blue” are likely to be understood as conveying more than what is stated explicitly (e.g. that the walls used to be a different colour), and that these inferences are more likely to arise when produced by a speaker who is knowledgeable about the situation and who does not typically talk a lot. Our results suggest that comprehenders have pervasive expectations of cooperativity which, when seemingly violated by a speaker’s trivial utterance, prompt reasoning about a speaker’s motivation for speaking to determine how the communicated content is relevant. We then turn to the processing costs of computing triviality-driven inferences and find evidence that there may be a cost to deriving relevance inferences. These findings extend previous work on inferencing, which typically targets specific classes of words that give rise to inferences and demonstrates that broader, systematic inferencing that can arise when addressees reason about speaker goals even in the absence of cues to pragmatic enrichment.
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Reksnes, Vilde Regine Stugaard; Rees, Alice; Cummins, Chris & Rohde, Hannah
(2024).
Tell me something I don't know: Speaker salience and style affect comprehenders' expectations for informativity.
In Lemke, Robin; Schäfer, Lisa & Reich, Ingo (Ed.),
Information structure and information theory.
Language Science Press.
ISSN 9783985541102.
p. 177–214.
doi:
10.5281/ZENODO.13383795.
Full text in Research Archive
Show summary
A comprehender’s estimate of what events or situations are typical in the world is distinct from their estimate of what a speaker is likely to report on. Comprehension and production studies have shown contradicting preferences for which types of estimates are used by comprehenders and by speakers: Typicality is favoured in comprehension (e.g. real-world typical content is associated with processing ease), whereas speakers’ production choices favour the inclusion of surprising or informative content (i.e. easily inferable or typical content is disfavoured). We posit that comprehenders are aware of and make use of speakers’ production preferences when anticipating upcoming content. In two studies, we elicit sentence completions as an index of comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming material and evaluate the informativity of these completions (their object typicality, presence of modification or negation, and information theoretic entropy and relative entropy scores). Experiment 1 manipulated the salience of the speaker and found that increased emphasis on the speaker led to an increase in informativity, showing that the more aware comprehenders are made of an intentionally communicating speaker, the more their expectations favour upcoming words that would yield an informative utterance. Experiment 2 further tested the malleability of this informativity bias by familiarising participants with two speakers who differ in the informativity of their utterances. When completing utterances from the two speakers, comprehenders provide more informative completions for the high-informativity speaker, showing that comprehenders are able to adapt their expectations for informativity to individual speakers’ communicative styles. This sensitivity to speakers’ production preferences highlights a role for informativity-driven reasoning about the speaker in models of language processing.
View all works in NVA
Published
June 3, 2025 11:33 AM
- Last modified
May 13, 2026 3:05 PM
