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Rational Redundancy in Referring Expressions: Evidence from Event‐related Potentials
Author(s) -
Tourtouri Elli N.,
Delogu Francesca,
Crocker Matthew W.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.13071
Subject(s) - grice , comprehension , referent , computer science , corollary , cognitive psychology , redundancy (engineering) , event (particle physics) , bounded function , psychology , linguistics , natural language processing , pragmatics , mathematics , mathematical analysis , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , pure mathematics , programming language , operating system
In referential communication, Grice's Maxim of Quantity is thought to imply that utterances conveying unnecessary information should incur comprehension difficulties. There is, however, considerable evidence that speakers frequently encode redundant information in their referring expressions, raising the question as to whether such overspecifications hinder listeners’ processing. Evidence from previous work is inconclusive, and mostly comes from offline studies. In this article, we present two event‐related potential (ERP) experiments, investigating the real‐time comprehension of referring expressions that contain redundant adjectives in complex visual contexts. Our findings provide support for both Gricean and bounded‐rational accounts. We argue that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if common ground is taken into account. We propose a bounded‐rational account of overspecification, according to which even redundant words can be beneficial to comprehension to the extent that they facilitate the reduction of listeners’ uncertainty regarding the target referent.