Sequential Sampling Models for Cognitive and Perceptual Decision Making

The Use of Colour in Reference Production: A Comparison between Dutch and Greek Mirjana Sekicki (mirjana_sekicki@yahoo.com) Faculty of Philosophy; University of Novi Sad, Serbia Jette Viethen (jette.viethen@mq.edu.au) Centre for Language Technology; Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Martijn Goudbeek (m.b.goudbeek@uvt.nl) Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC); Tilburg University, The Netherlands Emiel Krahmer (e.j.krahmer@uvt.nl) Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication (TiCC); Tilburg University, The Netherlands Abstract The important role of referring expressions in human communication has inspired much research in the fields of computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. Building on the research done by Viethen, Goudbeek and Krahmer (CogSci, 2012) the present study takes a cross-linguistic perspective on examining the use of the colour attribute in distinguishing a target referent. It aims at answering the following research question: Does the availability of adequate basic colour terms in a language affect the use of colour in reference production? We conducted a language production experiment with native speakers of Dutch and Greek. Our results confirm that the use of the colour attribute in reference production depends on the colour term resources of a particular language. In addition, we have recorded a large cross-linguistic difference in the proportion of the colour use, which we relate to the particular colour nuances used. Keywords: language production; reference production; colour; cross-linguistic study. Introduction Speakers often need to distinguish one object (the target referent) from other objects in the same scene that are not the intended referent (the distractors). Both spoken and written discourse often include noun phrases of the structure similar to the followingμ “the tall red bike at the corner”έ Such verbal descriptions produced in order to point to an object and put it in focus of the particular discourse are called referring expressions. When producing referring expressions a speaker needs to determine which attributes of a target (such as its colour, type, size or location) to include. This process, which is known as semantic content selection, has been a topic of extensive research in cognitive science. Colour has been found to be readily used and even favoured in reference production tasks (Pechmann, 1989; Sedivy, 2003). It is frequently included redundantly in a target description (Koolen, Goudbeek & Krahmer, 2013; Viethen & Dale, 2011). This is claimed to be due to the ease of colour perception, since it is perceived instantly and independent of context (Pechmann, 1989). In contrast, an object’s size is a relative attribute and its value can be determined only in comparison to the objects of the same type (Brown-Schmidt & Tanenhaus, 2006). Thus, the use of size in referring expression production has been shown to depend on how distinguishing size is of the target object (Sedivy, 2003; Viethen & Dale, 2011). The findings of Pechmann (1989) show that people tend to start articulating a referring expression before having thoroughly examined the whole scene. Hence, the adjectives that denote easily perceivable features tend to be articulated first. In his study, Pechmann (1989) found that such a feature was almost exclusively colour. People often produce overspecified referring expressions, since they tend to start uttering their description with the most easily perceivable characteristic and only later include the most relevant ones. Moreover, the results of Belke and Meyer (2002) are in agreement with Pechmann (1989) showing that speakers usually mention the absolute characteristics first, without reflecting upon how distinguishing they are of the target. Viethen, Goudbeek and Krahmer (2012) were the first to further investigate the mentioned tendency for using colour. They examined whether the preference for using the colour attribute is reduced when the colour of the target is relatively similar to that of the distractors. In addition, they considered the notion of colour term basicness. Berlin and Kay (1969) argued for eleven basic perceptual colour categories universal to human vision that act as referents for eleven or fewer Basic Colour Terms (BCTs) in any language. In order to be considered basic a colour term has to conform to various parameters. 1 The authors found Berlin and Kay (1969) set the following criteria for considering a colour term basic: (a) the colour term should be monolexemic – its meaning is not predictable from the meaning of its parts; (b) its meaning should not be included in the meaning of any other term; (c) its use should not be restricted to a certain class of objects; (d) it should be psychologically salient for speakers, which implies the tendency to occur at the beginning of elicited lists of colour terms, the stability of reference across informants and occasions of use, and the occurrence in the idiolects of all informants.