Communicative efficiency in language production: Optional case-marking in Japanese

Kurumada, Chigusa; Jaeger, T. Florian

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2015.03.003

Cited by 98 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 140 publications

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“…It is also possible that the hypothesized shift from SOV to SVO is restricted to situations where case marking is completely ambiguous and inefficient to disambiguate the interpretation of reversible events. Alternatively, related communicative efficiency accounts that do not attribute confusability primarily to argument order confusion (e.g., Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2012) predict SVO order in cases when the properties of the arguments would make OSV a plausible alternative order (Kurumada & Jaeger, 2013). This is compatible with our results.…”

Section: Why Verb-medial Responses?supporting

confidence: 88%

“…This hypothesis has been supported by data from English, German and Russian (Arnon, Snider, Hofmeister, Jaeger, & Sag, 2006;Kempe & MacWhinney, 1999;MacWhinney & Bates, 1989;Temperly & Gidea, 2010) and by data from an artificial language learning study (Fedzechkina et al, 2012). As sentence word order freedom increases, its informativity about the underlying syntactic structure might decrease (Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2013;Kurumada & Jaeger, 2013) and therefore the impact of constituent length on sentence word order might lessen as a result. Hence, English, Japanese and Korean speakers generally shifted word order more often than Basque speakers because word order is a significantly less reliable processing cue in Basque than in the other languages.…”

Section: The Competition Model: a Trade-off Between Processing Facilimentioning

confidence: 94%

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Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Ros

Santesteban

Fukumura

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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This study examined word order preferences as a function of phrasal length in Basque. Basque is an OV-language with flexible sentence word order and rich verb agreement. Contrary to the universal short-before-long preference predicted by availability models, Hawkins has argued that short-before-long orders are preferred in VO-languages such as English, whereas long-beforeshort orders are preferred in OV-languages such as Japanese (Hawkins, 2004). However, it is unclear how length affects word order preferences when an OV-language has rich verb agreement and allows postverbal arguments. We found a general long-before-short preference, and a tendency to place the verb in a sentence-medial position when one constituent is long. We argue that since agreement morphology signals the thematic role and case of surrounding phrases, it contributes to speeding up sentence processing. We conclude that morphologically rich languages employ both general adjacency mechanisms and language-specific resources to enhance language efficiency.

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Section: Why Verb-medial Responses?supporting

confidence: 88%

Section: The Competition Model: a Trade-off Between Processing Facilimentioning

confidence: 94%

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Ros

Santesteban

Fukumura

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An alternative view holds that even these highly automatic processes Kurumada & Jaeger, 2013 ). Similarly, optional function words have been found to be more likely to be produced when the constituent they introduce is unexpected in context (e.g., Jaeger, 2010Jaeger, , 2011Wasow et al, 2011 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Norcliffe

Jaeger

2014

Lang. cogn.

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a b st r a c t Recent proposals hold that the cognitive systems underlying language production exhibit computational properties that facilitate communicative effi ciency, i.e., an effi cient trade-off between production ease and robust information transmission. We contribute to the cross-linguistic evaluation of the communicative effi ciency hypothesis by investigating speakers' preferences in the production of a typologically rare head-marking alternation that occurs in relative clause constructions in Yucatec Maya. In a sentence recall study, we fi nd that speakers of Yucatec Maya prefer to use reduced forms of relative clause verbs when the relative clause is more contextually expected. This result is consistent with communicative effi ciency and thus supports its typological generalizability. We compare[ * ] We thank Serapio Canul Dzib for Yucatec Maya language consulting and for assistance in preparing, translating, and recording experimental stimuli; Marcelina Chan, Miguel Sosoya, José Cipriano Dzib Uitzil, and Lorena Pool Balam for transcribing the Yucatec data; Andrew Watts for programming assistance; and Juergen Bohnemeyer for sharing his knowledge of and insights into Yucatec grammar with us. We are also very grateful to Mtra. Leyla Gisela Leo Peraza and Ddra. Graciela Cortés Camarillo at the Universidad de Oriente (UNO), for their offi cial support of the project, and to Betsy Kraft and Marta Beatriz Poot Nahuat for their invaluable assistance with participant recruiting and administration. Finally, our thanks to all the students at the UNO who took part in our experiment. This work was partially funded through National Science Foundation grants BCS-0848353 and CAREER IIS-1150028 to TFJ. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect those of the National Science Foundation. Address for correspondence: Elisabeth Norcliff e, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. e-mail: elisabeth.norcliff e@mpi.nl nor cliffe and jaeger 168 two types of cue to the presence of a relative clause, pragmatic cues previously investigated in other languages and a highly predictive morphosyntactic cue specifi c to Yucatec. We fi nd that Yucatec speakers' preferences for a reduced verb form are primarily conditioned on the more informative cue. This demonstrates the role of both general principles of language production and their language-specifi c realizations.

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“…Beyond documenting these forces, an important ongoing research goal is to identify why production choices have this character. We see at least part of the answer in the inherent difficulty of language production, as described in the Production-DistributionComprehension framework (PDC; MacDonald, 2013), which hypothesizes that producers make implicit choices of utterance forms that minimize production difficulty (for related claims for production efficiency, see Kurumada & Jaeger, 2015). The repeated pairings of events, words, and structures seen in the current studies are examples of Plan Reuse in this framework, where previously-uttered forms become easier as a function of implicit learning over past production and comprehension events (e.g., Chang, 2009).…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

Montag

Matsuki

Kim

et al. 2017

Collabra: Psychology

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Cross-linguistic studies allow for analyses that would be impossible in a single language. To better understand the factors that underlie sentence production, we investigated production choices in main and relative clause production tasks in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean. The effects of both non-linguistic attributes (such as conceptual animacy) and language specific properties (such as word order) were investigated. Japanese and Korean are structurally similar to each other but different from English, which allowed for an investigation of the production consequences of non-linguistic attributes in different typological or word order contexts (when Japanese and Korean speakers make similar production choices that are unlike those of English speakers), as well as production choices that differ despite typological similarity (when Japanese and Korean speakers make different choices). Speakers of all three languages produced more passive utterances when describing animate entities, but the overall rate of passives varied by task and language. Further, the sets of items that were most likely to elicit passives varied by language, with Japanese and Korean speakers more likely to produce passives when patients were adversely affected by the depicted event. These results suggest a number of factors that contribute to language production choices across three languages, and how general cognitive constraints on sentence production may interact with the structure of a specific language.Keywords: Sentence production; relative clauses; passives; cross-linguistic analysis; Japanese; Korean An English speaker in a coffee shop, desiring coffee, might say, "A coffee," or "I'll take coffee, a small one, please," or "May I have a small?" Even in this highly constrained context, many different utterances can convey the speaker's message. This flexibility of language production, and speakers' abilities to navigate the high number of lexical and syntactic options to converge on a single utterance form, are central features of the production process and have become important topics of research. The research presented here addresses these issues by comparing production across three different languages and two different sentence constructions. This approach provides a detailed picture of how production flexibility-the availability of alternative syntactic and lexical options to convey a message-can vary across language and message, and how these factors shape speakers' implicit choices of words and sentence structures, providing insight into how language production processes settle on an utterance plan over alternative possibilities. Multiple Forces Shaping Production ChoicesLanguage production researchers have long recognized that the properties of both words and sentence structures affect producers' implicit utterance choices. Recently, several researchers have aimed to characterize a range of these effects by contrasting two means by which speakers converge on a single string of to-be-articulated words. Sentence const...

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Communicative efficiency in language production: Optional case-marking in Japanese

Cited by 98 publications

References 140 publications

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

Language Specific and Language General Motivations of Production Choices: A Multi-Clause and Multi-Language Investigation

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