Several important linguistic properties have been shown to develop through two-person interactions. Previous work had demonstrated that two properties of communication systems (arbitrariness and systematicity) developed most quickly when a conversational pair could easily construct common ground. These experiments used Pictionary-
like games to probe linguistic properties without the confounds of participants’ previous knowledge of languages. Additionally, other researchers had proposed that an important part of building common ground is that interlocutors understand transmissions as meaningful signals. This work on recognizing signalhood is related to Grice’s four maxims of communication, one of which posits that all communications are maximally relevant. Motivated by this body of work, we proposed to investigate communicators’ preference for interpreting a new signal as either a response to noise or a statement on the hyper/hyponym relationship between referents.