On language ‘utility’: processing complexity and communicative efficiency

Abstract

Functionalist typologists have long argued that pressures associated with language usage influence the distribution of grammatical properties across the world's languages. Specifically, grammatical properties may be observed more often across languages because they improve a language's utility or decrease its complexity. While this approach to the study of typology offers the potential of explaining grammatical patterns in terms of general principles rather than domain-specific constraints, the notions of utility and complexity are more often grounded in intuition than empirical findings. A suitable empirical foundation might be found in the terms of processing preferences: in that case, psycholinguistic measures of complexity are then expected correlate with typological patterns. We summarize half a century of psycholinguistic work on 'processing complexity' in an attempt to make this work accessible to a broader audience: What makes something hard to process for comprehenders, and what determines speakers' preferences in production? We also briefly discuss recently emerging approaches that link preferences in production to communicative efficiency. These approaches can be seen as providing well-defined measures of utility. With these psycholinguistic findings in mind, it is possible to investigate the extent to which language usage is reflected in typological patterns. We close with a summary of paradigms that allow the link between language usage and typology to be studied empirically. WIREs Cogni Sci 2011 2 323-335 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.126 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

“…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. This approach is AIMING AT SHORTER DEPENDENCIES 27 also broadly compatible with information-theoretic and inference-based accounts that link production preferences to efficient communication (Gibson et al, 2013;Jaeger, 2010; for further discussion and references see Jaeger & Tilly, 2011).…”

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

“…Haspelmath, 2006Haspelmath, , 2009Hawkins, 1994Hawkins, , 2004Hawkins, , 2007Hawkins, , 2014Sinnemäki, 2014, as well, more recently, from psycholinguistics and the cognitive sciences, e.g. Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Choudhary, Witzlack-Makarevich, & Bickel, 2008;Christiansen & Chater, 2008;Jaeger & Tily, 2011;MacDonald, 2013;McDaniel, McKee, Cowart, & Garrett, 2015; see also Bever, 1970). Typology-processing links are often based on an implicit assumption that processing mechanisms are the same universally, though this of course remains to be empirically demonstrated (for encouraging progress, see, e.g.…”

Predicting head-marking variability in Yucatec Maya relative clause production

“…These diachronic processes are argued to be motivated by cognitive principles of 'economy' or 'utility' (Givón, 1991(Givón, , 1992Haiman, 1983 ;Haspelmath, to appear ;Zipf, 1949 ): because frequent concepts are more predictable, less eff ort is required to convey them to the hearer. The functional/typological notion of utility bears a strong conceptual resemblance to communicative effi ciency, pointing to the possibility that the preferences observed during language production create a bias that, accumulated over generations, contributes to language change (see Jaeger & Tily, 2011 , and references therein). Preliminary support for this idea comes with recent research showing that lexicons (Piantadosi et al, 2011 ) and grammatical systems (Gibson, Piantadosi, Brink, Bergen, Lim, & Saxe, 2013 ;Maurits et al, 2010 ) across languages exhibit properties expected from communicatively effi cient systems (for a critique, see Ferrer i Cancho & del Prado Martín, 2011 ).…”