According to the communicative efficiency hypothesis, speakers should produce more linguistic material when comprehension difficulty increases. Here, we investigate a potential source of comprehension difficulty – listeners’ language proficiency – on speakers’ productions, using referential choice as a case study. On the one hand, the extent to which referential choice is impacted by the listener is debated. On the other hand, referential choice is impacted by communicative efficiency: pronouns are used less than longer referring expressions for less predictable referents (Tily & Piantadosi, 2009). Here, we compare participants’ descriptions of the same picture book to children, adult L2 learners and adult native speakers. We find that speakers use longer references when their interlocutors are learners – child and adult learners alike, illustrating an effect of listeners’ proficiency (regardless of age) on production choices. Importantly, the effect is stronger for child learners, pointing to possible differences between speech directed to child and adult learners. We discuss implications for theories of language change.
Many languages exhibit differential object marking (DOM), where only certain types of grammatical objects are marked with morphological case. Traditionally, it has been claimed that DOM arises as a way to prevent ambiguity by marking objects that might otherwise be mistaken for subjects (e.g., animate objects). While some recent experimental work supports this account (Fedzechkina et al., 2012), research on language typology suggests at least one alternative hypothesis. In particular, DOM may instead arise as a way of marking objects that are atypical from the point of view of information structure. According to this account, rather than being marked to avoid ambiguity, objects are marked when they are given (already familiar in the discourse) rather than new. Here, we experimentally investigate this hypothesis using two artificial language learning experiments. We find that information structure impacts participants’ object-marking, but in an indirect way: atypical information structure leads to a change of word order, which then triggers increased object marking. Interestingly, this staged process of change is compatible with documented cases of DOM emergence (Iemmolo, 2013). We argue that this process is driven by two cognitive tendencies. First, a tendency to place discourse given information before new information, and second, a tendency to mark non-canonical word order. Taken together, our findings provide corroborating evidence for the role of information structure in the emergence of DOM systems.
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