Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In referring to objects, speakers produce overinformative modifiers (e.g., "the large blue circle") more for color than size and increasingly with scene variation. Does first-person sensory experience establish this overmodification pattern? Do speakers adjust to listeners' perceptual capacities? In a referential communication task, congenitally blind speakers described target shapes to a sighted listener and sighted speakers to a sighted or blind listener. Trials varied in whether color or size alone was sufficient to identify the referent and in number of distractors sharing the redundant property. When talking to a sighted listener, blind and sighted speakers used color more than size and became more redundant as scene variation increased. When talking to a blind listener, sighted speakers' bias toward color disappeared. Blind and sighted speakers were more redundant overall when talking to a listener with different sensory capacities. Speakers flexibly adjust overmodifications to the listener's perceptual capacities, consistent with mentalistic audience-design.