Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important part of explaining how people communicate isto understand how people relate language to entities in theworld. In describing measurements, people prefer to use quali-tative words like ‘tall’ without precise applicability conditions,also known as vague words. The use of vague language varieswidely across contexts, individuals, and tasks (single referencevs. comparisons between targets), but despite this variabil-ity, is used quite successfully. A potential strategy for usingvague language is to leverage the set of alternative descrip-tors to settle on the best option. To determine whether peopleuse this strategy, we conducted an experiment where partici-pants picked vague words from sets of alternatives to describeeither probability or color values. We varied the set of alter-natives from which participants could choose. Empirical evi-dence supports the hypothesis that people use the set of avail-able options to pick vague descriptors. The theoretical impli-cations of this work are discussed.