When conversational participants jointly attend to an object in the environment, how do they refer to it through their utterances and/or body movements to refer to it? Hindmarsh and Heath (2000) has proposed that participants employ the principle of recipient design of visual reference, wherein they design a visual reference as to provide recipients with clearer views of the relevant objects and scenes. In this study, focusing on a visual reference to an object occluded by a referrer/recipient's body or another object in the environment, we conducted detailed analyses of three segments collected from natural conversation data. The results show that some visual references were characterized as follows: (1) not providing a “clearer view”to the recipient, (2) not referring to the position or direction of the object directly, (3) specifying the spatial layout of the referrer, the recipient, an occluding object, and a referent. These results suggest that the recipient design of visual reference is sufficient, if an object is referred to visually, such that the recipient can recognize the spatial layout of the referrer, the recipient, and the object. Hence, even if clearer views are not available, a referent can be established visually if the recipient is provided with a guide to it.
