Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Nominal reference is very flexible—the same object may becalled a dalmatian, a dog, or an animal when all are literallytrue. What accounts for the choices that speakers make in howthey refer to objects? The addition of modifiers (e.g. big dog)has been extensively explored in the literature, but fewer stud-ies have explored the choice of noun, including its level of ab-straction. We collected freely produced referring expressionsin a multi-player reference game experiment, where we ma-nipulated the object’s context. We find that utterance choiceis affected by the contextual informativeness of a description,its length and frequency, and the typicality of the object forthat description. Finally, we show how these factors naturallyenter into a formal model of production within the RationalSpeech-Acts framework, and that the resulting model predictsour quantitative production data.