Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore contextual adaptation of referring expressions with respect to referential ambiguity and communicative intention. We focus not only on whether people adapt, but also on how by contrasting lexical specification (e.g., "batter") and syntactic modification (e.g., "man in white pants") when discriminating between objects in natural scenes (e.g., a batter wearing white pants and a referee). There are three main results. First, we replicate that speakers adapt their expressions to avoid ambiguity. Second, communicative intention has an effect: participants tended to use more specific names in a discrimination task than in a descriptive task, even without referential ambiguity in the context. Third, when given the choice, participants tended to prefer more specific words over adding modification - that is, using lexical rather than syntactic means to resolve ambiguity. This suggests that it may be less demanding to increase informativity of referring expressions with lexical specification than syntactic modification.