Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While some word meanings, like “spotted,” depend on in-tersubjectively accessible properties of the world, others like“pretty” invoke speakers’ subjective beliefs. We explored chil-dren and adults’ sensitivity to the subjectivity of a range ofadjectives, including words like “spotted” and “pretty,” butalso words like “tall,” which are evaluated relative to a stan-dard. Participants saw two speakers who had independentlyexperienced sets of exemplars of a novel object kind disagreeabout whether a critical exemplar was, e.g., “tall,” “pretty,” and“spotted.” In Experiments 1 and 3, speakers had seen distinctsets of exemplars, while in Experiments 2 and 4, the sets wereidentical. Adults always judged disagreements over words like“pretty” as faultless—indicating that both speakers “could beright”—and permitted less faultless disagreement for ones like“tall” when the speakers had experienced identical sets of ex-emplars. Strikingly, children did not respond in an adult-likemanner until age 8 or 9, but their explanations for speakers’conflicting assertions suggested some sensitivity to the kindsof knowledge relevant for evaluating different adjectives.