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

This study aims to investigate whether language comprehenders are sensitive to the likelihood of color adjective use (e.g., how frequently people use the word 'yellow') for different object categories (e.g., to refer to a banana vs a shirt). Eye-tracking studies show that comprehenders rely on their conceptual knowledge about the color of objects, looking at yellow things when they hear a word for a typically yellow object (e.g., a banana when hearing 'sunflower'; Huettig & Altmann, 2004, 2011; Yee & Sedivy, 2006; Naor Raz, 2003). However, what happens when they hear a speaker mention a color? If comprehenders assume that the speaker is being informative, they should anticipate an object that has low probability of possessing that color in the real world. This yields an interesting empirical prediction: while prior works shows that comprehenders anticipate yellow objects following the word 'banana', is it possible that they disfavor bananas following the word 'yellow'? All our studies present participants with a display containing a pair of foods and a pair of clothes; the linguistic materials consist of two conditions, a Color Adjective condition and a Number Word condition. This pre-registration pertains to two new studies: we have already conducted one pilot study on Mechanical Turk (pilot, N=20) using an original set of visual materials, and a full study on Mechanical Turk (Study 0, N=52) using the same set of visual materials. The two new studies are as follows: Study 1. New web study with improved, high-resolution, uniform background images corresponding to the same food-clothing pairs as in the original study (e.g., two yellow bananas paired with two yellow shirts). This study manipulates Modification (Color Adjective vs Color Word) and food-clothing pairing (the arbitrary pairings used in Study 0 vs a second arbitrary set of pairings; e.g., two yellow bananas paired with two yellow skirts). Study 2. Eye-tracking study with a new set of high-resolution, uniform background images corresponding to the same food-clothing pairs as in Study 0. Data for Study 2 has already been collected, but no eye-tracking or response time analysis has been performed. Picture selection analysis, on the other hand, has already been performed. Given the different stages of Study 1 and Study 2, we will write two separate pre-registrations. Study 3. Corpus analysis of Google ngram data. We are not pre-registering this work because we have already conducted exploratory analyses and visualizations, and unlike Studies 1 and 2, this corpus analysis does not involve data collection by the authors.