Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When communicating, people adapt their linguistic representations to those of their interlocutors. Previous studies haveshown that adaptation also works at the semantic level, with listeners aligning their interpretations of vague expressionssuch as quantifiers to those by a certain speaker. While adaptation has been found to arise by passive exposure to the inter-locutors linguistic representations, we hypothesize that actively seeking information could boost this effect. In particular,asking clarification questions can be helpful to reduce the uncertainty about someone elses interpretation. We focus on thegradable adjectives big and small and show that, in line with previous findings, speakers can align their representations tothose by their interlocutors. Moreover, this effect is boosted when people are given the possibility to ask questions. Thoughparticipants can generally ask for useful information, we observe that this ability improves as the interaction progresses.