We tested a typicality vs informativity bias in the comprehension of color modifiers.

We used two sentence-completion tasks: offline web-based and online eye-tracking.

Results show comprehenders anticipate mention of objects without prototypical color.

Corpus study rules out alternative account based on simple co-occurrence statistics.

Comprehenders rely on speakers’ informative use of color, not on color typicality.

When people hear words for objects with prototypical colors (e.g., ‘banana’), they look at objects of the same color (e.g., lemon), suggesting a link in comprehension between objects and their prototypical colors. However, that link does not carry over to production: 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, which have no prototypical color). These findings yield an interesting prediction, which we tested here: while prior work shows that people look at yellow objects when hearing ‘banana’, they should look away from bananas when hearing ‘yellow’. The results of an offline 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 context-free 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., what content would be informative).

Language comprehension

Overspecification

Color typicality

Bayes Rule

Eye tracking

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.