Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does listeners’ perceptual bias influence their interpreta-tion of an ambiguous multiword utterance? We address thisquestion by investigating the relationship between word or-der in a binomial (an expression of type “A and B”) and vi-sual properties of image pairs serving as its potential referents.We found that listeners’ choices were strongly influenced byiconicity and relative salience of images within the pair: par-ticipants preferred referents where the first mentioned imagewas located on the left, as well as pairs where the first im-age was larger than the second image. The effect of image or-der tended to be stronger than the influence of image size, andboth were modulated by participants’ general visual field pref-erences (determined in a separate experimental condition). Wefurther show that binomial phrase interpretation can be simu-lated by a Rational Speech Act model that includes both wordorder effects and utterance-independent preferences of the par-ticipants.