The Alternative Interpretations Task (AIT)

There has been much research on the resolution of linguistic ambiguity, i.e. on how recipients take an ambiguous sentence such as “he saw her duck” and ascertain what their interlocutor intended it to mean. However, there has been little or no research on the opposite, i.e. on whether recipients can take sentences that are mildly or moderately ambiguous (again, as in “he saw her duck”) and explicate the multiple possible meanings it could have. This is despite the fact that many forms of humour rely on such exploitation of ambiguity (as in puns, etc.); and the fact that there are several historical and currently-extant forms of textual interpretation and hermeneutic tradition that rely on this ability also. In order to better understand ambiguity exploitation, we have developed a novel task, the Alternative Interpretations Task (AIT) that presents ambiguous sentences to participants and requires them to provide as many different interpretations for the sentence as possible. This research aims to explore 1) whether there is individual variation in this ability and, if so, what factors influence this, and 2) the extent to which this ability represents a form of linguistic creativity (or, at least, is correlated with other extant tests of creativity). The current study is designed to explore the properties of the AIT, and the correlations between performance on it and various demographic data, IQ measures, existing creativity measures, and neurodivergences.