Publications

Abstract

Contrary to the Gricean maxims of Quantity (Grice, 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over- specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is also unclear whether referential redundancy hinders or facilitates comprehension. We present a bounded-rational account of referential redundancy, according to which any word in an utterance, even if it is redundant, can be beneficial to comprehension, to the extent that it facilitates the reduction of listeners’ uncertainty regarding the target referent in a co-present visual scene. Information-theoretic metrics, such as Shannon’s entropy (Shannon, 1948), were employed in order to quantify this uncertainty in bits of information, and gain an estimate of the cognitive effort related to referential processing. Under this account, speakers may, therefore, utilise redundant adjectives in order to reduce the visually-determined entropy (and thereby their listeners’ cognitive effort) more uniformly across their utterances. In a series of experiments, we examined both the comprehension and the production of over-specifications in complex visual contexts. Our findings are in line with the bounded-rational account. Specifically, we present evidence that: (a) in view of complex visual scenes, listeners’ processing and identification of the target referent may be facilitated by the use of redundant adjectives, as well as by a more uniform reduction of uncertainty across the utterance, and (b) that, while both speaker-internal and addressee-oriented processes are at play in the production of over-specifications, listeners’ processing concerns may also influence the encoding of redundant adjectives, at least for some speakers, who encode redundant adjectives more frequently when these adjectives contribute to a more uniform reduction of referential entropy.

Abstract

A controversial issue in psycholinguistics is the degree to which speakers employ audience design during language production. Hypothesising that a consideration of the listener’s needs is particularly relevant when the listener is under cognitive load, we had speakers describe objects for a listener performing an easy or a difficult simulated driving task. We predicted that speakers would introduce more redundancy in their descriptions in the difficult driving task, thereby accommodating the listener’s reduced cognitive capacity. The results showed that speakers did not adapt their descriptions to a change in the listener’s cognitive load. However, speakers who had experienced the driving task themselves before and who were presented with the difficult driving task first were more redundant than other speakers. These findings may suggest that speakers only consider the listener’s needs in the presence of strong enough cues, and do not update their beliefs about these needs during the task.

Abstract

Violations of the maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over-specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural datasuggest that under-specified expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-specified expressions are also detrimental to comprehension. In this study we shed light on this debate, providing neurophysiological evidence supporting the view that extra information facilitates comprehension. We further present novel evidence that referential failure due to under-specification is qualitatively different from explicit cases of referential failure, when no matching referential candidate is available in the context.