Perceptual difficulty differences predict asymmetry in redundant modification with color and material adjectives

Abstract

When referring to objects, speakers are often more specific than necessary for the purpose of establishing unique reference, e.g., by producing redundant modifiers. A computational model of referring expression production that accounts for many of the key patterns in redundant adjectival modification assumes that adjectives differ in how noisy (reliable), and consequently, how useful they are for reference. Here we investigate one hypothesis about the source of the assumed adjectival noise: that it reflects the perceptual difficulty of establishing whether the property denoted by the adjective holds of the contextually relevant objects. In Exp.1, we collect perceptual difficulty norms for items that vary in color and material. In Exp. 2, we test the highest (material) and lowest (color) perceptual difficulty items in a reference game and find that material is indeed less likely to be mentioned redundantly, replicating previous work. In Exp. 3, we obtain norms for the tested items in a second perceptual difficulty measure with the aim of testing the effect of perceptual difficulty within property type. The overall results provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that the propensity to redundantly use color over material adjectives may be driven by the relative ease of assessing an object’s color, compared to the relative difficulty of assessing its material.

Adjective position and referential efficiency in American Sign Language: Effects of adjective semantics, sign type and age of sign exposure

“…The results of our first experiment were in line with our predictions. However, because color is a visually salient property and color adjectives have a special status in referential communication (e.g., they are used redundantly more often than other absolute adjectives, such as material or pattern; see Jara-Ettinger & Rubio-Fernandez, 2021 ; Kursat & Degen, 2021 ; Rubio-Fernandez, 2019 ; Sedivy, 2005 ; Tarenskeen et al, 2015 ), the strong preference to use color adjectives prenominally may not generalize to other absolute adjectives in ASL. To further test our hypotheses, we therefore conducted the same referential communication task in Experiment 2 , but comparing material and scalar adjectives.…”

ASL Production

“…The results of our first experiment were in line with our predictions. However, because color is a visually salient property and color adjectives have a special status in referential communication (e.g., they are used redundantly more often than other absolute adjectives, such as material or pattern; see Jara-Ettinger & Rubio-Fernandez, under review; Kursat & Degen, 2021;Rubio-Fernandez, 2019;Sedivy, 2005;Tarenskeen et al, 2015), the strong preference to use color adjectives prenominally may not generalize to other absolute adjectives in ASL. To further test our hypotheses, we therefore conducted the same referential communication task in Experiment 2, but comparing material and scalar adjectives.…”

The social basis of referential communication: Speakers construct physical reference based on listeners’ expected visual search.

“…In an eye-tracking task, she also showed that listeners are more likely to interpret material adjectives contrastively (which allowed them to anticipate the right member of a pair) than color adjectives (which did not elicit anticipatory looks to the target). A recent study by Kursat and Degen (2021) revealed faster recognition of color than material in a property verification task, and higher rates of redundant color adjectives than material. However, while generally consistent with the assumption that color is more visually salient than material, these studies did not directly compare speakers' production of color and material adjectives with listeners' visual search by color and material during adjective processing.…”