“This is a monkeylope!” - A registered report on the factors of novel word creation

While native speakers of a language have tens of thousands of words at their disposal, they still regularly create and use novel words. Since this comes with communicative risks and costs – most importantly, not being understood by recipients – there have to be (perceived) advantages to creating novel words that outweigh these issues. We systematically explore these factors in a controlled experimental setting. We presented participants with images of existing and new animals with increasing degrees of conceptual distance to existing animals. Participants have to refer to these images either in an open format or with single words. The images are presented either in isolation (Experiment 1), or with two distractors created from different (Experiment 2) or the same base animals (Experiment 3). Each image is repeatedly presented to investigate effects of repeated reference and presentation. We measure how often participants create novel word labels for the stimuli, and derive hypotheses for the main effects and key interactions of conceptual distance, target frequency, distractor frequency, response format, and task setting from a theoretical framework based on the Gricean pragmatic principles as well as the concept of common ground. Conceptual distance, response format, and experimental task setting have clear effects on the number of novel word responses. However, we observe no effects for target or distractor frequency, suggesting no effect of common ground in our experimental setting. Participants also tend to over-specify their responses, rather than strictly adhering to pragmatic principles.