Pupillary Indices of Cognitive Workload in (In-)Efficient Reference Production

Speakers’ use of redundant information in referential communication has been the subject of much debate, as it seemingly defies Grice’s Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). While some research argues for an egocentric view on referential redundancy (i.e., that it results from a concern to ease production effort), other work supports an audience-design view (i.e., that speakers strive for communicative efficiency). This research has mainly leveraged listeners’ comprehension as an indirect index of production strategy, while it is yet unclear whether audience-design indeed incurs increased cognitive effort for the speaker. In this study, we used pupillometry to directly assess the cognitive load associated with different referential production strategies, finding evidence for modulated effort based on speakers’ engagement in reasoning about the efficiency of their utterances.