In referential communication, Grice's Maxim of Quantity is thought to imply that utterances conveying unnecessary information should incur comprehension difficulties. There is, however, considerable evidence that speakers frequently encode redundant information in their referring expressions, raising the question as to whether such overspecifications hinder listeners’ processing. Evidence from previous work is inconclusive, and mostly comes from offline studies. In this article, we present two event‐related potential (ERP) experiments, investigating the real‐time comprehension of referring expressions that contain redundant adjectives in complex (...) visual contexts. Our findings provide support for both Gricean and bounded‐rational accounts. We argue that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if common ground is taken into account. We propose a bounded‐rational account of overspecification, according to which even redundant words can be beneficial to comprehension to the extent that they facilitate the reduction of listeners’ uncertainty regarding the target referent. (shrink)

Recent work has shown that linguistic and visual contexts jointly modulate linguistic expectancy and, thus, the processing effort for a expected critical word. According to these findings, uncertainty about the upcoming referent in a visually-situated sentence can be reduced by exploiting the selectional restrictions of a preceding word, which then reduces processing effort on the critical word. Interestingly, however, no such modulation was observed in these studies on the expectation-generating word itself. The goal of the current study is to investigate (...) whether the reduction of uncertainty simply does not modulate processing effort-or whether the particular subject-verb-object sentence structure used in these studies accounts for the observed pattern. To test these questions, the current design reverses the functional roles of nouns and verbs by using sentence constructions in which the noun reduces uncertainty about upcoming verbs, and the verb provides the disambiguating and reference-resolving piece of information. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 both replicate the effect found in previous work, albeit on the verb in the current study. Results on the noun, where uncertainty is reduced and expectations are generated in the current design, were mixed and were most likely influenced by design decisions specific to each experiment. These results show that processing of the reference-resolving word—whether it be a noun or a verb—reliably benefits from the prior linguistic and visual information that lead to the generation of concrete expectations. (shrink)