A Cognitive Model of the Acquisition and Use of Referring Expressions

Referring expressions are used to describe a person, object or event. Different referring expressions can be used to describe the same person or object. For example, to describe a specific person, one could use a full noun phrase (NP) such as the pirate, or a pronoun, such as he. However, in certain discourse contexts using a pronoun would lead to an incorrect interpretation for the listener. Adult speakers use a full NP instead of a pronoun in these cases, suggesting that adult speakers take into account the listener’s perspective. In contrast, children up to the age of 6 prefer to use a pronoun in these cases. In this study, we investigate how children acquire adult-like performance on their use of referring subjects by modeling experimental data using the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Anderson, 2007). The cognitive model allows us to investigate the complex interaction between formal linguistic constraints and cognitive factors. In addition, the model generates detailed and testable predictions with respect to linguistic performance.