Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In situated communication, reference to an entity in theshared visual context can be established using either anexpression that conveys precise (minimally specified) orredundant (over-specified) information. There is, however, along-lasting debate in psycholinguistics concerning whetherthe latter hinders referential processing. We present evidencefrom an eye tracking experiment recording fixations as wellas the Index of Cognitive Activity – a novel measure ofcognitive workload – supporting the view that over-specifications facilitate processing. We further presentoriginal evidence that, above and beyond the effect ofspecificity, referring expressions that uniformly reducereferential entropy also benefit processing.