Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers are often over-informative, referring to the color and shape of a referent even when all objects in a scene are unique. Interestingly, this helps listeners locate the target. If speakers are indeed sensitive to listeners' online processing demands, they should be more over-informative when addressing someone whose processing is especially slow. Here we show that English-speaking adults produce more redundant color adjectives when speaking to children than adults (Exp 1); that although Spanish-speakers produce fewer redundant color adjectives than English-speakers overall, they too do so more often for children (Exp 2); that these results are independent of experience with young children (Exp 3), and that children themselves (ages 4-10) are more over-informative when speaking to younger children than adults (Exps 4 and 5). Collectively, these results suggest that sensitivity to listeners' online processing demands is robust, emerges early in development, and may be especially tailored to young learners.