Referential efficiency across adulthood: communicative strategies and cognitive control

Traditional theories inpragmatics characterize an efficient speaker as one who avoids redundancy (i.e. make your contribution as informative as is required but not more). Recentwork, however,calls into question this view, characterizing an efficient speaker as one whose referentialchoicesfacilitatealistener’sidentification ofreferents.A prediction follows fromthis recent account: specific contexts will lend themselves to redundancy, butan efficient speaker should onlybe redundant whenitis helpful to the listener.