A psychophysical analysis of referential communication establishes a causal link between a visual stimulus and a speaker’s perception of this stimulus, and between the speaker’s internal representation and their reference production. Here, I argue that, in addition to visual perception and language, social cognition plays an integral part in this complex process, as it enables successful speaker-listener coordination. This pragmatic analysis of referential communication tries to explain the redundant use of color adjectives. It is well documented that people use color words when it is not necessary to identify the referent; for instance, they may refer to “the blue star” in a display of shapes with a single star. This type of redundancy challenges influential work from cognitive science and philosophy of language, suggesting that human communication is fundamentally efficient. Here, I explain these seemingly contradictory findings by confirming the visual efficiency hypothesis: redundant color words can facilitate the listener’s visual search for a referent, despite making the description unnecessarily long. Participants’ eye movements revealed that they were faster to find “the blue star” than “the star” in a display of shapes with only one star. A language production experiment further revealed that speakers are highly sensitive to a target’s discriminability, systematically reducing their use of redundant color adjectives as the color of the target became more pervasive in a display. It is concluded that a referential expression’s efficiency should be based not only on its informational value, but also on its discriminatory value, which means that redundant color words can be more efficient than shorter descriptions.

指称交流的心理物理学分析在视觉刺激和说话者对该刺激的感知之间，以及说话者的内部表征和他们的参考产生之间建立了因果关系。在这里，我认为，除了视觉感知和语言之外，社会认知在这个复杂的过程中也起着不可或缺的作用，因为它能够实现成功的演讲者-听众协调。这种对参考交流的语用分析试图解释颜色形容词的冗余使用。有据可查的是，当不需要识别所指对象时，人们会使用颜色词；例如，他们可能会在带有单颗星的形状显示中提及“蓝星”。这种冗余挑战来自认知科学和语言哲学的有影响力的工作，表明人类交流从根本上是有效的。在这里，我通过证实这些看似矛盾的发现来解释视觉效率假设：尽管描述不必要地长，但多余的颜色词可以促进听者对所指对象的视觉搜索。参与者的眼球运动表明，在只有一颗星星的形状显示中，他们找到“蓝色星星”的速度比找到“星星”的速度要快。语言生成实验进一步表明，说话者对目标的可辨别性高度敏感，随着目标的颜色在显示中变得更加普遍，他们系统地减少了对冗余颜色形容词的使用。得出的结论是，指称表达的效率不仅应基于其信息价值，还应基于其区分价值，这意味着冗余的颜色词比较短的描述更有效。