Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When do speakers choose a personal pronoun (e.g., 'she') instead of a fuller referential expression (e.g., 'Rosalía' or 'the singer in white'), and how are these expressions interpreted? Prior work has identified two key factors: contextual cues affecting referent predictability and the structural properties of the antecedent (Kehler and Rohde, 2013). While structural properties are known to influence both production and interpretation, it remains unclear whether predictability plays a comparable role for speakers and listeners. Most previous studies have examined production or interpretation in isolation, often using non-interactive tasks. Here, we investigate both factors in an interactive communicative setting that places pressure on efficient communication. We find that referent predictability influences both pronoun production and interpretation, suggesting that predictability plays a stronger role in more naturalistic communicative contexts.