Many aspects of language are highly context-dependent. Use of pronouns, for example, relies heavily on prior discourse: ‘it’ could refer to a coffee cup or the sunrise, and whether a speaker uses ‘it’ or ‘my coffee’ also depends on context. In addition to referential expressions, use of different sentence forms is also influenced by context (e.g. active vs passive, or clefted vs non-clefted forms, such as ‘I saw a cat’ vs ‘It was a cat that I saw.’) Language provides us with different ways to package the same basic propositional content, and understanding how the context modulates these choices is a key aspect of pragmatics. In this talk, Elsi Kaiser presents a series of psycholinguistic experiments investigating the power of information packaging. The results show that, even when the basic content is kept constant, the way it is packaged has far-reaching effects: First, our ability to recognize something as being an opinion (vs. a fact) is significantly impacted by linguistic form, even when the basic content is kept constant. Second, the interpretation of pronouns is impacted in nuanced ways by information-structural notions that may at first appear to be at odds (topic and focus). Third, language also allows us to detect how, when the same event is presented differently in the visual domain (whether agent and patient are presented together or segmented into two images), visual information packaging affects our expectations about upcoming linguistic discourse. As a whole, all of these studies show that -- even when basic truth-conditional meaning is kept constant -- pragmatic, context-dependent aspects of language have deep effects on language comprehension.