Over-specification of small cardinalities in referential communication

Frontiers in Psychology. 2021. Vol. 12. Article 745230.

Zevakhina N., Pasalskaya E., Chinkova A.

The paper presents experimental evidence for the over-specification of small cardinalities in reference 4 production. The first experiment shows that when presented with a small set (2, 3 or 4) of unique objects, 5 the speaker includes a numeral denoting a small cardinality into the description of given objects, although 6 it is over-informative for the hearer (e.g., “three stars”). On the contrary, when presented with a large set 7 of unique objects, the speaker does not include a numeral denoting a large cardinality into their description, 8 so she produces a bare plural (e.g., “stars”). The effect of small cardinalities resembles the effect of over-9 specifying color in reference production, which has been extensively studied in recent years (cf. 10 Tarenskeen et al. 2015, Rubio-Fernandez 2016 among many others). This suggests that, like color, small 11 cardinalities are absolute and salient. The second experiment demonstrates that when presented with an 12 identical small set of monochrome objects, the speaker over-specifies a small cardinality to a much greater 13 extent than a color. This suggests that small cardinalities are even more salient than color. The third 14 experiment reveals that when slides are flashed on the screen one by one, highlighted objects of small 15 cardinalities are still over-specified. We argue that a plausible explanation for the salience of small 16 cardinalities is a subitizing effect, which is the human capacity to instantaneously grasp small cardinalities.

Keywords: референция, числительные, избыточность, numerals, redundancy, Informativeness, overspecification, reference production, color adjectives, сверхинформативность, прилагательные цветообозначений

Publication based on the results of: Formal Philosophy and Logic of Rational Agency (2022)