Redundancy: Is it the lost key to better communication?

Hsia, Hower J.

doi:10.1007/bf02799311

Cited by 20 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In other words, signers were more redundant than silent gesturers. Redundancy is also a prevalent trait in spoken languages (Hsia, 1977 ). Arguably, redundancy does lead to greater effort and cost for information transmission, which at first glance might appear to be a property pulling language users away from communicative efficiency when only sheer length is considered (Motamedi et al., 2019 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, in the present study communicative efficiency is not conceived simply as a reduction in effort and in the cost of information transmission—the notion includes informative quality as well (Futrell, Levy, & Gibson, 2020 ; Gibson et al., 2019 ). Redundancy in languages is used for multiple purposes, including reducing errors in the encoding and the decoding process, reducing the loss of information in noise, interference and distortion, as well as facilitating “association and discrimination, establishing memory traces, and helping to prevent forgetting” (Hsia, 1977 , p. 78). As such, redundancy constitutes a crucial factor in achieving communicative efficiency, since it ensures the minimization of information loss and an increase in disambiguation (Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2012 ; Shannon, 1948 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Simultaneity as an Emergent Property of Efficient Communication in Language: A Comparison of Silent Gesture and Sign Language

2022

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Sign languages use multiple articulators and iconicity in the visual modality which allow linguistic units to be organized not only linearly but also simultaneously. Recent research has shown that users of an established sign language such as LIS (Italian Sign Language) use simultaneous and iconic constructions as a modality-specific resource to achieve communicative efficiency when they are required to encode informationally rich events. However, it remains to be explored whether the use of such simultaneous and iconic constructions recruited for communicative efficiency can be employed even without a linguistic system (i.e., in silent gesture) or whether they are specific to linguistic patterning (i.e., in LIS). In the present study, we conducted the same experiment as in Slonimska et al. with 23 Italian speakers using silent gesture and compared the results of the two studies. The findings showed that while simultaneity was afforded by the visual modality to some extent, its use in silent gesture was nevertheless less frequent and qualitatively different than when used within a linguistic system. Thus, the use of simultaneous and iconic constructions for communicative efficiency constitutes an emergent property of sign languages. The present study highlights the importance of studying modality-specific

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%