Predictable Words Are More Likely to Be Omitted in Fragments-Evidence From Production Data.

ABSTRACT: Instead of a full sentence like Bring me to the university (uttered by the passenger to a taxi driver) speakers often use fragments like To the university to get their message across. So far there is no comprehensive and empirically supported account of why and under which circumstances speakers sometimes prefer a fragment over the corresponding full sentence. We propose an information-theoretic account to model this choice: A speaker chooses the encoding that distributes information most uniformly across the utterance in order to make the most efficient use of the hearer's processing resources (Uniform Information Density, Levy and Jaeger, 2007). Since processing effort is related to the predictability of words (Hale, 2001) our account predicts two effects of word probabilit

SUBMITTER: Lemke R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8341074 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature