Cue Effectiveness in Communicatively Efficient Discourse Production

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge in accounts motivated by information theory that consider language production to be partially driven by a preference for communicative efficiency. Evidence from discourse production (i.e., production beyond the sentence level) has been argued to suggest that speakers distribute information across discourse so as to hold the conditional per-word entropy associated with each word constant, which would facilitate efficient information transfer (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). This hypothesis implies that the conditional (contextualized) probabilities of linguistic units affect speakers' preferences during production. Here, we extend this work in two ways. First, we explore how preceding cues are integrated into contextualized probabilities, a question which so far has received little to no attention. Specifically, we investigate how a cue's maximal informativity about upcoming words (the cue's effectiveness) decays as a function of the cue's recency. Based on properties of linguistic discourses as well as properties of human memory, we analytically derive a model of cue effectiveness decay and evaluate it against cross-linguistic data from 12 languages. Second, we relate the information theoretic accounts of discourse production to well-established mechanistic (activation-based) accounts: We relate contextualized probability distributions over words to their relative activation in a lexical network given preceding discourse.

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

“…To summarize, our findings suggest that the well‐documented inverse correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of a case system can be explained by learners' preference for grammatical systems that encode linguistic information efficiently. More generally, our results provide additional support for the hypothesis that at least some cross‐lexical and grammatical properties of languages represent efficient trade‐offs between effort and robust information transmission (Maurits, Perfors, & Navarro, ; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, ; Qian & Jaeger, ). Our results also contribute to a growing body of work demonstrating the potential of using miniature artificial language learning to study the relationship between learning biases and language structures.…”

Lossy‐Context Surprisal: An Information‐Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing

“…The idea of information locality here is similar to the idea of a decay in cue effectiveness presented in Qian and Jaeger (). In that work, the authors show that it is possible to predict entropy distributions across sentences under an assumption that predictive cues decay in their effectiveness, which is essentially the state of affairs described by progressive noise.…”

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

“…While the informativity of cues has received some attention in research on language comprehension, little is known about how cue informativity aff ects language production (but see Jaeger, 2006 ;Post & Jaeger, 2010 ;Qian & Jaeger, 2012 ). Post and Jaeger ( 2010 ) investigated how the informativity of diff erent cues to a word's identity aff ected that word's phonetic reduction.…”

“…For information-theoretic approaches to language production in particular, the empirical base is further limited, since this work tends to require larger databases on the basis of which informativity can be estimated (Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009 ;Piantadosi et al, 2011 ;Resnik, 1996 ). To the extent that cross-linguistic investigations within information-theoretic frameworks exist, they have thus mostly focused on lexical and sublexical properties, i.e., levels of linguistic description for which units are more frequent (e.g., Graff & Jaeger, 2009;Pellegrino, Coupé, & Marsico, 2011 ;Piantadosi et al, 2011 ;Qian & Jaeger, 2012 ;Wedel et al, 2013 ). Above the lexical level, some suggestive cross-linguistic support for communicative effi ciency in fact comes from the comprehension research fi nding that comprehenders e x pe c t speakers to produce reduced forms when the meaning the form conveys is contextually expected, and less reduced forms otherwise.…”