Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite the rise in communicative technologies for healthy aging, little research has focused on how effectively older adults process language spoken by artificial agents. We explore whether a robot's redundant (but potentially helpful) descriptions facilitate real-time comprehension in younger and older listeners. Gaze was recorded as participants heard instructions like "Tap on the [purple/closed] umbrella" for a display containing eight unique objects. We manipulated the description (no-adjective, color-adjective, state-adjective) and the visual context, specifically whether there was another object bearing the property denoted by the adjective (purple/closed notebook). Relative to the no-adjective condition, redundant color adjectives speeded comprehension when they uniquely identified targets, whereas (less-salient) state adjectives always impeded comprehension. No age-related differences were observed. Paralleling human-human studies, language processing in human-robot communication is facilitated when salient information narrows visual search. Together, these findings help inform the future design of communicative technologies.