The only one strategy in context

•How do adults solve privative ambiguities and interpret “the only one”?•Do adults always minimally commit themselves to the weaker interpretation?•We show that context takes precedence over truth conditional considerations.•We propose a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: if context is provided, use it.

This paper investigates domain restriction in the resolution of privative ambiguities of sentences like The orange parakeet is the only one that is hiding itself, which is ambiguous between an anaphoric and an exophoric interpretation. Previous work by Crain et al. (1994) argued for a built-in parsing preference for weak readings of privative ambiguities. Manipulating the amount of the contextual information available, we present results that challenge Crain et al.’s conclusion: in our study, we show that context takes precedence over truth-conditional considerations in the resolution of privative ambiguities in adults.