Contrastive inferences are sensitive to informativity expectations, adjective semantics and visual salience

People sometimes derive contrastive inferences from adjective-modified noun phrases. For example, the description ‘the short pencil’ would normally be understood to contrast a shorter and a longer pencil. In a series of eye-tracking studies, Sedivy (2003, 2004) found that scalar and material adjectives elicited contrastive inferences, but color adjectives did not, which she interpreted as a difference in informativity expectations. Here we assessed whether not only pragmatics, but also semantic and perceptual factors contribute to the derivation of contrastive inferences. We used Sedivy’s eye-tracking paradigm to compare the interpretation of scalar, material and color adjectives, employing new analyses to test the view that different fixation patterns should be observed on the target and the competitor objects depending on the semantics of the adjective and the visual salience of the encoded property. The results support our hypotheses, confirming that all three adjective types can elicit contrastive inferences, but their derivation is shaped differently by pragmatic, semantic and perceptual factors.