Modeling Behavior in Truth Value Judgment Task Experiments

Truth Value Judgment Task experiments (TVJTs) are a common means of investigating pragmatic competence, particularly with regards to scalar inference. We present a novel quantitative linking function from pragmatic competence to participant behavior on TVJTs, based upon a Bayesian probabilistic model of linguistic production. Our model captures a range of observed phenomena on TVJTs, including intermediate responses on a nonbinary scale, population and individual-level variation, participant endorsement of false utterances, and variation in response due to socalled scalar diversity.