Summary It has been reported that contextual stimulation affects judgment of a stimulus ensemble when the judgmental language is relative, categorical, and/or arbitrary. The current study explored the effect of context on judgments of semantic stimuli. College students, 65 male and 80 female, gave magnitude estimations of expressions of amount, expressions of probability, size of noun referents, and enactive imagery value of verbs in Experiments 1 through 4, respectively. There was no evidence for the occurrence of contrast with expressions of probability or amount, but context did affect ratings of the size of nouns and imagery value of verbs. These results were interpreted to suggest that contrast does not occur when stimuli are rated along a highly familiar dimension in a compatible response language, but that contrast emerges when Ss judge stimuli on an unfamiliar dimension or translate their judgments into a response language incompatible with the stimulus dimension.