  There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication
partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings.
To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a
communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we
establish several key properties of the mental representations of these
expectations, or lexical priors, based on recent probabilistic theories.
Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is
represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables
accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same
association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of
these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when
communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly
increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings
suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated
uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of
their own.
