Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often face referential ambiguity; one cue to resolve it is adjectival description. Beyond narrowing potential referentsto those that match a descriptor, listeners may infer that a described object is one that contrasts with other present objectsof the same type (tall cup contrasts with another, shorter cup). This contrastive inference guides the visual identificationof a familiar referent as an utterance progresses (Sedivy et al., 1999). We extend this work, asking whether listeners usethis type of inference to guide explicit referent choice when reference is ambiguous, and whether this varies with adjectivetype. We find that participants consistently use size adjectives contrastively, but not color adjectives (Experiment 1)evenwhen color is described with more relative language (Experiment 2) or emphasized with prosodic stress (Experiment 3).Listeners can use adjective contrast to disambiguate a novel words referent, but do not treat all adjective types as equallycontrastive.