Linguistic Redundancy and its Effects on Younger and Older Adults’ Real‐Time Comprehension and Memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to age-related decline (e.g., processing speed and memory) or their greater proclivity for linguistic redundancy, as suggested in language production studies. The present study explores the effects of linguistic redundancy on younger and older listeners' incremental referential processing, judgments of informativity, and downstream memory performance. In an eye tracking task, gaze was monitored as listeners followed instructions from a social robot referring to a unique object within a multi-object display. Critical trials were varied in terms of modifier type ("…closed/purple/[NONE] umbrella") and whether displays contained another object matching target properties (closed purple notebook), making modifiers less effective at narrowing attention. Relative to unmodified descriptions, redundant color modifiers facilitated comprehension, particularly when they narrowed attention to a single referent. Descriptions with redundant state modifiers always impaired real-time comprehension. In contrast, memory measures showed faster recognition of objects previously described with redundant state modifiers. Although color and state descriptions had different effects on referential processing and memory, informativity judgments showed participants perceived them as informationally redundant to the same extent relative to unmodified descriptions. Importantly, the patterns did not differ by listener age. Together, the results show that the effects of linguistic redundancy are stable across adulthood but vary as a function of modifier type, visual context, and the measured phenomenon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".