{"pk":29386,"title":"Influence of partner behaviour on overspecification","subtitle":null,"abstract":"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.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"overspecification; partner alignment; referentialcommunication; pragmatics"}],"section":"Language and Groups","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pv876q5","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jia","middle_name":"E.","last_name":"Loy","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Kenny","middle_name":"","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-02T02:00:00+08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29386/galley/19247/download/"}]}