Color interpretation is guided by informativity expectations, not by world knowledge about colors

When people hear words for objects with prototypical colors (e.g., ‘banana’), they look at objects of the same color (e.g., lemon). However, 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). These findings yield an interesting prediction, which we tested here: People may look at yellow objects when hearing ‘banana’, but they should look away from bananas when hearing ‘yellow’. The results of an online 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 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., their informativity expectations).