Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What governs how much information speakers include in referring expressions? Atypical properties of objects aremore likely to be included in referring expressions than typical ones. E.g., speakers are more likely to call a blue banana a “bluebanana” and a yellow banana a ”banana”. A unified account of this phenomenon is lacking. When should a rational speakermention an object’s color? Reference production is modeled within the Rational Speech Act framework. Utterances (“banana”,“blue”, and “blue banana”) are taken to have a graded semantics: rather than assuming all bananas are equally good instancesof “banana”, we empirically elicited object-utterance typicality values for all possible utterances. Pragmatic speakers selectutterances proportionally to the probability that a literal listener using a graded semantics will select the intended referent. Weevaluate the proposed model on a dataset of freely produced referring expressions collected in an interactive reference gameexperiment via the web.