Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adjective ordering preferences (e.g., big brown bag vs. brownbig bag) are robustly attested in English and many unrelatedlanguages (Dixon, 1982). Scontras, Degen, and Goodman(2017) showed that adjective subjectivity is a robust predictorof ordering preferences in English: less subjective adjectivesare preferred closer to the modified noun. In a follow-up tothis empirical finding, Simoniˇc (2018) and Scontras, Degen,and Goodman (to appear) claim that pressures from success-ful reference resolution and the hierarchical structure of mod-ification explain subjectivity-based ordering preferences. Weprovide further support for this claim using large-scale sim-ulations of reference scenarios, together with an empirically-motivated adjective semantics. In the vast majority of cases,subjectivity-based adjective orderings yield a higher probabil-ity of successful reference resolution.