In conversation, speakers are expected to offer as much information as required by the purposes of the exchange. (Grice,1975). Classic theories of communication assume that the principle of informativeness extends beyond linguistic inter-actions (Grice, 1989; Sperber & Wilson, 1986), but relevant evidence so far is limited. We replicated the paradigm of areferent selection study in which preschool-aged children successfully apply the principle of informativeness to linguisticexchanges (Stiller et al., 2015) and added a matched non-linguistic condition in which the referent choice was commu-nicated through pictures instead of verbal descriptions. Children between the ages of 3.5 to 5 performed significantlybetter in both the linguistic and non-linguistic conditions compared to a control condition, and there were no significantdifferences between linguistic and non-linguistic conditions for 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, or 5-year-olds. We conclude thatpreschool-aged children apply pragmatic principles to pictures as well as words.

Cognitive penetrability describes cognition and perception as interconnected, with cognition impacting the process ofperception rather than just the interpretation. The current study addresses this claim in the domain of language, askingif language helps people detect nearly-invisible stimuli. Two experiments were adapted from Lupyan and Spivey (2010),where auditory cues were found to be more beneficial than visual cues in recognizing letters. Participants reported thepresence of a target letter that was either preceded by an auditory or visual cue (e.g., cues were either hearing emm or seeingM, followed by a visual M as a target). Detection sensitivity was calculated and compared within cue presentation type.Neither visual nor auditory cues helped participants recognize target letters more than the no-cue condition. These resultsdiffer from previous work demonstrating linguistic facilitation and indicated that neither linguistic nor visual informationaid in perceiving a matching item.