Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have shown that children have difficulty inferring intended referents of definite/indefinite determin-ers: e.g., that ”Give me the ball” implies a specific ball, while ”Give me a ball” requests any ball from a larger set. Here, weshow that these findings need not indicate a fragile capacity for pragmatic reasoning because adults only make such inferenceswithin specific contexts. Across four studies, we found that when presented with novel labels in definite contexts (the dax),adults consistently selected unique objects as the referent (though they were not at ceiling), suggesting they interpreted thedefinite as conveying specificity. Strikingly, however, when presented in indefinite contexts (a dax), subjects did not reliablylink novel labels to objects of a larger set of kind-members, unless the context explicitly encouraged them to reason aboutthe intended addressee. Together, these findings suggest that failures to make inferences about definiteness need not reflectpragmatic incompetence.