DOI: 10.1111/tops.12716 ISSN: 1756-8757

An Information‐Theoretic Account of Availability Effects in Language Production

Richard Futrell
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

I present a computational‐level model of language production in terms of a combination of information theory and control theory in which words are chosen incrementally in order to maximize communicative value subject to an information‐theoretic capacity constraint. The theory generally predicts a tradeoff between ease of production and communicative accuracy. I apply the theory to two cases of apparent availability effects in language production, in which words are selected on the basis of their accessibility to a speaker who has not yet perfectly planned the rest of the utterance. Using corpus data on English relative clause complementizer dropping and experimental data on Mandarin noun classifier choice, I show that the theory reproduces the observed phenomena, providing an alternative account to Uniform Information Density and a promising general model of language production which is tightly linked to emerging theories in computational neuroscience.

More from our Archive