Editorial : models of reference

Abstract

To communicate, speakers need to make it clear what they are talking about. Referring expressions play a crucial part in achieving this, by anchoring utterances to things. Examples of referring expressions include noun phrases such as “this phenomenon,”“it,”and“ the phenomenon to which this Topic is devoted. ”Reference is studied throughout the Cognitive Sciences. Recent years have seen a new wave of work in this area, as witnessed by a number of journal Special Issues. The Research Topic “Models of Reference” in Frontiers in Psychology is a new milestone, focussing on contributions from Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics. Unsurprisingly given the journal, the response to our Call for Papers has focussed predominantly on psycholinguistic work. A majority of submissions dealt with language production, as opposed to comprehension. In what follows,we summarize the papers accepted for this Research Topic, stressing some of the main themes emerging, including audience design (Section2);over specification (Section3); visual perception, and variation between speakers (Section4). We end with some general observations.