Lexical search and social reasoning jointly explain communication in associative reference games.

Abstract

Effective linguistic communication depends upon many different cognitive processes working together in concert. Yet, our computational models of these processes are often developed in isolation, without considering how these processes fit together. In this work, we study a simplified variant of the popular board game Codenames, which highlights the integration of two important processes: (1) lexical retrieval and (2) pragmatic reasoning. In this task, speakers must generate a "clue" word from their full lexicon that allows their partner to select a pair of target words from a context of distractors. In Experiment 1, we evaluate a suite of different models on an existing corpus of production data, finding that models with both semantic search and pragmatic reasoning components significantly outperform ablated variants. Experiment 2 elicits targeted endorsements for a particularly diagnostic set of clues, providing further evidence for the pragmatic selection component in isolation. Finally, Experiments 3 and 4 elicit lists of clues that speakers are considering for a target pair in the absence and presence of the board context, respectively, providing further evidence for the way context is infused into semantic search. Taken together, our findings shed new light on the way that retrieval processes (generating promising candidates) and selection processes (evaluating the likely communicative success of these candidates) must work in tandem to support effective communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).