by Malihe Alikhani, Kimele Persaud, Kevin Pei, Brian McMahan, Pernille Hemmer, Matthew Stone
In submission, Journal of Discourse Processes
Speakers use vague words flexibly to refer to different ranges of continuous values in different contexts. One explanation is that speakers reason creatively to give as much information as possible in context using the available terms (Potts et al. 2016). In this paper, we investigate this hypothesis for vague probability and color terms. Our empirical results show interestingly opposing behaviors: speakers instructed to use terms from a specified list adjust their use of probability terms, but not their use of color terms, based on the alternatives provided to them.