When a speaker produces a referring expression, their
overarching goal is to get the addressee to identify a particular
object in the context. This goal leads to the expectation that
speakers will use a referring expression tailored to the
perspective of the addressee. While research in
psycholinguistics has indeed found that speakers tailor their
referring expressions to the addressee’s perspective, they also
find egocentric tendencies; namely, a sensitivity to the
speaker’s own perspective. Mozuraitis, Stevenson and Heller
(2018) make the novel proposal that “mixing” perspectives is
a design feature of the production system, modelling data from
an experiment where knowledge mismatch concerned object
function. Here we further test this model on the more common
knowledge mismatch of visual perspective, modelling data
from Vanlangendonck, Willems, Menenti and Hagoort (2016).
The modelling results shed new light on concept of “referential
success” that has been assumed to guide reference production.