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Speakers often face choices as to how to structure their intended message into an utterance. Here we investigate the influence of contextual predictability on the encoding of linguistic content manifested by speaker choice in a classifier language, Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, modifying a noun with a numeral obligatorily requires the use of a classifier. While different nouns are compatible with different SPECIFIC classifiers, there is a GENERAL classifier that can be used with most nouns. When the upcoming noun is less predictable, using a more specific classifier would reduce the noun’s surprisal, potentially facilitating comprehension (predicted to be preferred under Uniform Information Density, Levy & Jaeger, 2007), but the specific classifier may be dispreferred from a production standpoint if the general classifier is more easily available (predicted by Availability-Based Production; Bock, 1987; Ferreira & Dell, 2000). Here we report a picture-naming experiment confirming two distinctive predictions made by Availability-Based Production.
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Evidence for Availability Effects on Speaker Choice in the Russian Comparative Alternation
When a language offers multiple options for expressing the same meaning, what principles govern a speaker’s choice? Two well-known principles proposed for explaining wideranging speaker preference are Uniform Information Density and Availability-Based Production. Here we test the predictions of these theories in a previously uninvestigated case of speaker choice. Russian has two ways of expressing the comparative: an EXPLICIT option (Ona bystree chem ja/She fast- COMP than me-NOM) and a GENITIVE option (Ona bystree menya/She fast-COMP me-GEN). We lay out several potential predictions of each theory for speaker choice in the Russian comparative construction, including effects of postcomparative word predictability, phrase length, syntactic complexity, and semantic association between the comparative adjective and subsequent noun. In a corpus study, we find that the explicit construction is used preferentially when the postcomparative noun phrase is longer, has a relative clause, and is less semantically associated with the comparative adjective. A follow-up production experiment using visual scene stimuli to elicit comparative sentences replicates the corpus finding that Russian native speakers prefer the explicit form when post-comparative phrases are longer. These findings offer no clear support for the predictions of Uniform Information Density, but are broadly supportive of Availability- Based Production, with the explicit option serving as an unreduced form that eases speakers’ planning of complex or lowavailability utterances. Code for this study is available
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- Award ID(s):
- 2121074
- PAR ID:
- 10358629
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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