When a speaker refers to a third person during a conversation, he or she must choose among a number of possible names (e.g., Jane, Dr. Smith, the President), the exact one chosen depending on the speaker and addressee's relation to that person. The experiments reported in this article investigate the degree to which listeners are sensitive to the social relations expressed in the choice of such a name. The first experiment presented stories that contained ambiguous names (e.g., it had two people who could be called Dr. Smith). The results showed that subjects used the social relationship implied by the name to determine reference. The second experiment showed that people remember the exact name used to refer to a person much more than they remember the exact word referring to an object. Thus, social information in names is picked up by readers and encoded into memory. These results suggest that social information in reference is not a secondary or optional part of language processing.