Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Generic statements, like ”birds lay eggs” or ”dogs bark” are simple and ubiquitous in naturally produced speech. However,the inherent vagueness of generics makes their interpretation highly context-dependent. Building on work by Tessler &Goodman (in press) showing that generics can be thought of as inherently relative (i.e. more birds lay eggs than youwould expect), we explore the consequences of different implied comparison categories on the interpretation of novelgenerics. In Experiments 1 and 2, we manipulated the set of categories salient to a listener by directly providing themthe comparison sets. In Experiments 3 and 4, we collected participants demographic information and used these naturallyoccurring differences as a basis for differences in the participants’ comparison sets. Our results confirmed the hypothesisthat prevalence judgments of features in novel categories are sensitive to differences in their corresponding comparisoncategories. These results suggest a possible source for well-intentioned miscommunications.