Understanding how our brains process language is one of the fundamental issues in cognitive science. In order to reach such understanding, it is critical to cover the full spectrum of manners in which humans acquire and experience language. However, due to a myriad of socioeconomic factors, research has disproportionately focused on monolingual English speakers. In this talk, I present a series of studies that systematically target fundamental questions about bilingual language use across a range of conversational contexts, both in production and comprehension. The results lay the groundwork to propose a more inclusive theory of the neurobiology of language, with an architecture that assumes a common selection principle at each linguistic level and can account for attested features of both bilingual and monolingual speech in, but crucially also out of, experimental settings.

Theoretical linguistics postulates abstract structures that successfully explain key aspects of language. However, the precise relation between abstract theoretical ideas and empirical data from language use is not always apparent. Here, we propose to empirically test abstract semantic theories through the lens of probabilistic pragmatic modelling. We consider the historically important case of quantity words (e.g., `some', `all'). Data from a large-scale production study seem to suggest that quantity words are understood via prototypes. But based on statistical and empirical model comparison, we show that a probabilistic pragmatic model that embeds a strict truth-conditional notion of meaning explains the data just as well as a model that encodes prototypes into the meaning of quantity words.