Color interpretation is guided by informativity expectations, not by world knowledge about colors

Abstract

When people hear words for objects with prototypical colors (e.g., ‘banana’), they look at objects of the same color (e.g., lemon). However, the experimental record also shows that when people speak, they tend to omit prototypical colors, using color adjectives when it is informative (e.g., when referring to clothes). These findings yield an interesting prediction, which we tested here: People may look at yellow objects when hearing ‘banana’, but they should look away from bananas when hearing ‘yellow’. The results of an online sentence-completion task (N=100) and an online eye-tracking task (N=41) confirmed that when presented with truncated color descriptions (e.g., ‘Click on the yellow...’), people anticipate clothing items rather than stereotypical fruits. A corpus analysis ruled out the possibility that this association between color and clothing arises from simple co-occurrence statistics. We conclude that comprehenders make linguistic predictions based not only on what they know about the world (e.g., which objects are yellow) but also on what speakers tend to say about the world (i.e., their informativity expectations).

Linear Order in Language

“…Assuming that both listeners and speakers should converge on a shared discriminative code, and that both incrementally process the signal, also listeners should benefit from a smooth signal. Evidence showing that listeners use language to predict not only states of the world but also parts of the upcoming signal already corroborates this idea (e.g., as previously mentioned, DeLong et al, 2005;Lau et al, 2016;Rohde & Rubio-Fernandez, 2021;Tribushinina & Mak, 2016;van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha et al, 2004;Willems et al, 2016). If, in addition, it could be confirmed in future research that listeners benefit from longer but smoother noun phrases, this would further suggest that a smooth signal benefits the communication process as a whole, including speakers and listeners.…”

“…This became evident when comparing speakers of English with speakers of Spanish, a language with mainly postnominal adjective placement. Thus, while in monochrome displays English prenominal color adjectives were uninformative about the target referent, they did reduce uncertainty about the target noun which in Rubio-Fernández's (2016) study was always a clothing item -a noun category which is likely to be preceded by a color adjective (Rohde & Rubio-Fernandez, 2021). Thus together with the clear effect of article informativity on prenominal adjective production we have observed in our study, we suggest that prenominal color adjectives can provide information both about the signal and the non-linguistic environment.…”