Elli Tourtouri

Osnabrück University | UOS · Institute of Cognitive Science

In referential communication, Grice's Maxim of Quantity is thought to imply that utterances conveying unnecessary information should incur comprehension difficulties. There is, however, considerable evidence that speakers frequently encode redundant information in their referring expressions, raising the question as to whether such overspecificatio...

Contrary to the Gricean maxims of Quantity (Grice, 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over- specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is al...

Contrary to the Gricean maxims of Quantity (Grice 1975), it has been repeatedly shown that speakers often include redundant information in their utterances (over- specifications). Previous research on referential communication has long debated whether this redundancy is the result of speaker-internal or addressee-oriented processes, while it is als...

A controversial issue in psycholinguistics is the degree to which speakers employ audience design during language production. Hypothesising that a consideration of the listener’s needs is particularly relevant when the listener is under cognitive load, we had speakers describe objects for a listener performing an easy or a difficult simulated drivi...

Contra the Gricean Maxim of Quantity (Grice 1975), recent studies indicate that speakers’ referential expressions often contain more information than strictly necessary for target identification (e.g., Koolen et al. 2011). Such overspecifications may be driven by egocentric concerns (minimise speaker’s cognitive effort, cf. Keysar et al. 1998) or a...

In situated communication, reference to an entity in the shared visual context can be established using either an expression that conveys precise (minimally specified) or redundant (over-specified) information. There is, however, a long-lasting debate in psycholinguistics concerning whether the latter hinders referential processing. We present evid...

Over-specifications (OS) are expressions that provide more information than minimally required for the identification of a referent, thereby violating Grice’s 2nd Quantity Maxim. In recent years, psycholinguistic research has tried to test the empirical validity of Grice’s Maxim, resulting in conflicting findings. That is, there is evidence both th...

Violations of the Maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over- specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural data suggest that under-specified (US) expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-...