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We report on two experiments investigating the effect of an increased cognitive load for speakers on the choice of referring expressions. Speakers produced story continuations to addressees, in which they referred to characters that were either salient or non-salient in the discourse. In Experiment 1, referents that were salient for the speaker were non-salient for the addressee, and vice versa. In Experiment 2, all discourse information was shared between speaker and addressee. Cognitive load was manipulated by the presence or absence of a secondary task for the speaker. The results show that speakers under load are more likely to produce pronouns, at least when referring to less salient referents. We take this finding as evidence that speakers under load have more difficulties taking discourse salience into account, resulting in the use of expressions that are more economical for themselves.

The notion of salience has been singled out as the explanatory factor for a diverse range of linguistic phenomena. In particular, perceptual salience (e.g., visual salience of objects in the world, acoustic prominence of linguistic sounds) and semantic-pragmatic salience (e.g., prominence of recently mentioned or topical referents) have been shown to influence language comprehension and production. A different line of research has sought to account for behavioral correlates of cognitive load during comprehension as well as for certain patterns in language usage using information-theoretic notions, such as surprisal. Surprisal and salience both affect language processing at different levels, but the relationship between the two has not been adequately elucidated, and the question of whether salience can be reduced to surprisal / predictability is still open. Our review identifies two main challenges in addressing this question: terminological inconsistency and lack of integration between high and low levels of representations in salience-based accounts and surprisal-based accounts. We capitalize upon work in visual cognition in order to orient ourselves in surveying the different facets of the notion of salience in linguistics and their relation with models of surprisal. We find that work on salience highlights aspects of linguistic communication that models of surprisal tend to overlook, namely the role of attention and relevance to current goals, and we argue that the Predictive Coding framework provides a unified view which can account for the role played by attention and predictability at different levels of processing and which can clarify the interplay between low and high levels of processes and between predictability-driven expectation and attention-driven focus.

Several studies suggest that referential choices are influenced by animacy. On the one hand, animate referents are more likely to be mentioned as subjects than inanimate referents. On the other hand, animate referents are more frequently pronominalized than inanimate referents. These effects have been analyzed as effects of conceptual accessibility. In this paper, we raise the question whether these effects are driven only by lexical concepts, such that referents described by animate lexical items (e.g., "toddler") are more accessible than referents described by inanimate lexical items (e.g., "shoe"), or can also be influenced by context-derived conceptualizations, such that referents that are perceived as animate in a particular context are more accessible than referents that are not. In two animation-retelling experiments, conducted in Dutch, we investigated the influence of lexical and perceptual animacy on the choice of referent and the choice of referring expression. If the effects of animacy are context-dependent, entities that are perceived as animate should yield more subject references and more pronouns than entities that are perceived as inanimate, irrespective of their lexical animacy. If the effects are tied to lexical concepts, entities described with animate lexical items should be mentioned as the subject and pronominalized more frequently than entities described with inanimate lexical items, irrespective of their perceptual animacy. The results show that while only lexical animacy appears to affect the choice of subject referent, perceptual animacy may overrule lexical animacy in the choice of referring expression. These findings suggest that referential choices can be influenced by conceptualizations based on the perceptual context.