Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a series of reference game experiments(Frank and Goodman, 2012) and fits the results to a numberof Bayesian computational models in order to explore the roleof linguistic and perceptual bias in iterative pragmatic reason-ing. We first discuss the modeling choices made by Franke andJ ̈ager (2016) and others who have used similar frameworks tomodel reference game tasks. We introduce a space of differentplausible Bayesian models based on this work, and comparemodels’ fit to new experimental data to replicate the basic find-ings of Franke and J ̈ager (2016) regarding the strong role forperceptual salience (e.g., the primacy of color over shape asa differentiating property for possible referents) and linguis-tic category (e.g., a preference for nouns over adjectives) inpragmatic reference resolution. We then uncover an additionalpossible effect of what we call labeling, whereby a hearer maysimply ignore non-salient, non-differentiating semantic prop-erties, in a manner similar to how an incremental algorithm(Reiter and Dale, 1992) might ignore certain semantic proper-ties when generating referring expressions.