In current approaches to pragmatic reasoning the comprehension
and production of referring expressions is modeled as a
result of the interlocutors’ mutual perspective-taking. While
such models of pragmatic reasoning have been empirically validated
in referential language games experiments, empirical
(and computational) work on the generation of referring expressions
has shown that speakers do not always take the listener’s
perspective into account, but instead produce referring
expressions according to their own preferences. One particularly
well studied example is color: speakers often include
color terms in their referring expressions even if they do not
help identify the intended referent. We show that like speakers,
listeners treat color differently from other properties like
e.g. size. Our results suggest that listeners do not seem to
perform much pragmatic reasoning when the referring expression
only expresses color, but instead follow a simple saliencebased
heuristic.