Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Correlational statements (e.g., "$X$ is associated with $Y$") can be interpreted as conveying a causal relationship. Recent work suggests that such interpretations may be legitimate pragmatic inferences, especially in decision-relevant contexts. Here, we investigate whether causal enrichment of correlational language affects memory recall and message passing, and how pragmatic features of the communicative context modulate it. Our findings support a pragmatic account of causal enrichment of correlational language.