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The notion of common ground is important for the production of referring expressions: In order for a referring expression to be felicitous, it has to be based on shared information. But determining what information is shared and what information is privileged may require gathering information from multiple sources, and constantly coordinating and updating them, which might be computationally too intensive to affect the earliest moments of production. Previous work has found that speakers produce overinformative referring expressions, which include privileged names, violating Grice’s Maxims, and concluded that this is because they do not mark the distinction between shared and privileged information. We demonstrate that speakers are in fact quite effective in marking this distinction in the form of their utterances. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, speakers choose to overspecify privileged names.

While speakers have been shown to adapt to the knowledge state of their addressee in choosing referring expressions, they often also show some egocentric tendencies. The current paper aims to provide an explanation for this "mixed" behavior by presenting a model that derives such patterns from the probabilistic combination of both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives. To test our model, we conducted a language production experiment, in which participants had to refer to objects in a context that also included a visually misleading object (e.g., a crayon shaped like a Lego brick) whose function was either known to both partners, or known just to the speaker but not the addressee. Modeling results indicate that the experimental findings cannot be explained by assuming that speakers tailor a referring expression solely to their own perspective or to the perspective of their addressee. Instead, accounting for the behavioral pattern requires an approach where both perspectives influence the choice of referring expressions. Nevertheless, in our situation, speakers consider their partner's perspective more than their own.

In conversation, each person has their own perspective which is shaped by their unique set of life experiences. Considering of how one’s own perspective is similar to, or different from, the perspective of their conversational partner is crucial in order to communicate effectively in conversation. Effects of perspective are found in both production and comprehension, from the message level, to sentence type and structure, to words and their sounds. This chapter provides a review of past and present literature on the representations of perspective and the underlying mechanisms that support use of perspective in conversation, outlining both the central empirical findings and the key theoretical positions. We also discuss future lines of inquiry that would be essential to maintaining progress in our understanding of this most basic phenomenon.