Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers often overspecify by using colour adjectives redun-dantly in referential communication. We investigated whetherthis tendency to overspecify is influenced by a partner’s lin-guistic behaviour, and whether the effect is enhanced by lex-ical repetition and semantic relatedness. We used a director-matcher task in which speakers interacted with either a consis-tently overspecific or a consistently optimal partner. Our re-sults show that partner behaviour influences overspecification.An analysis over time indicates that speakers tended to over-specify at the outset, but reduced this behaviour over interac-tion with an optimal partner much more than with an overspe-cific partner. This may suggest that overspecification (at leastwith colour modifiers) is the “default” behaviour, with speak-ers adapting to optimality in a partner’s linguistic behaviour.