Alternatives play a crucial in linguistics theory and have been used to model phenomena at various levels of language (see Gotzner & Romoli, 2022 for an overview). In this talk, I review outstanding theoretical questions concerning the nature and representation of alternatives and how we can answer these questions using psycholinguistic experiments. I will present a series of studies looking at which alternatives are activated during incremental, how listeners compute pragmatic inferences and how children acquire context-dependent meaning.