Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior work suggests that speakers and listeners use discourse pragmatics to constrain potential referents and make infer-ences about the relationship of a novel referent to its category. This work addresses the use of discourse specificity andavailable referents in combination to make inferences about category feature typicality. In a visual search task and sub-sequent typicality rating task, participants ratings of typicality for an novel object’s color were affected by whether theobjects color was specified in the search prompt (e.g., Find the (blue) dax), the color of distractor objects (same as ordifferent from target), and the shape of distractor objects (same as or different from target). Specification of target colorin the prompt decreased typicality ratings, in keeping with work suggesting that over-informative utterances can induceinference of atypicality.