Abstract
A psychophysical analysis of referential communication establishes a causal link between a visual stimulus and a speaker’s perception of this stimulus, and between the speaker’s internal representation and their reference production. Here, I argue that, in addition to visual perception and language, social cognition plays an integral part in this complex process, as it enables successful speaker-listener coordination. This pragmatic analysis of referential communication tries to explain the redundant use of color adjectives. It is well documented that people use color words when it is not necessary to identify the referent; for instance, they may refer to “the blue star” in a display of shapes with a single star. This type of redundancy challenges influential work from cognitive science and philosophy of language, suggesting that human communication is fundamentally efficient. Here, I explain these seemingly contradictory findings by confirming the visual efficiency hypothesis: redundant color words can facilitate the listener’s visual search for a referent, despite making the description unnecessarily long. Participants’ eye movements revealed that they were faster to find “the blue star” than “the star” in a display of shapes with only one star. A language production experiment further revealed that speakers are highly sensitive to a target’s discriminability, systematically reducing their use of redundant color adjectives as the color of the target became more pervasive in a display. It is concluded that a referential expression’s efficiency should be based not only on its informational value, but also on its discriminatory value, which means that redundant color words can be more efficient than shorter descriptions.
Highlights
Reference is one of the most fundamental functions of communication and humans have at their disposal a wide variety of referential forms: from an ostensive glance or a pointing gesture, to the use of pronouns (e.g., “I saw that”) or complex noun phrases (e.g., “I met the young couple who has a small dog”)
Reference can be performed in the gestural, verbal or written modalities. Against this wide range of referential forms, referent types, communicative settings and modalities, referential communication studies such as the present one focus on a rather specific form of reference: verbal reference to physical objects in interactive settings. This focus on physically grounded reference during interaction allows investigating three cognitive abilities that are often recruited in interactive referential communication, but which are not always included in theoretical and computational models of reference: namely, pragmatics, visual perception and social cognition
The first aim is to develop a pragmatic account of physical reference that integrates pragmatics, visual perception and social cognition into the use and comprehension of color adjectives
Summary
Reference is one of the most fundamental functions of communication and humans have at their disposal a wide variety of referential forms: from an ostensive glance or a pointing gesture, to the use of pronouns (e.g., “I saw that”) or complex noun phrases (e.g., “I met the young couple who has a small dog”). An empirical test of the visual efficiency hypothesis Given the fundamental role that discriminability plays in referential communication, an eye-tracking study was conducted to investigate whether redundant color adjectives facilitate target identification in contexts where color is distinctive of the target. Contrary to the standard pragmatics view of redundancy as inefficient, the visual efficiency hypothesis predicts that redundant color adjectives will only hinder visual search when color does not discriminate the referent, whereas it should facilitate target identification for the listener when it is distinctive It follows from this prediction that participants should identify “the blue star” faster than “the star” in Poly/4, Poly/8, and PopOut/8, whereas the reverse should hold for the Non-Pop-Out/8 condition. In the second experiment, the discriminability of the target color parametrically varied in displays of 9 shapes, ranging from maximal discriminability (i.e., the target color was unique in the display) to zero discriminability (i.e., all shapes were the same color as the target; see Fig. 4 for sample items)
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