Lemke Robin, Reich Ingo, Schäfer Lisa, Drenhaus Heiner
Collaborative Research Center 1102, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Department of Modern German Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jul 22;12:662125. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.662125. eCollection 2021.
Instead of a full sentence like (uttered by the passenger to a taxi driver) speakers often use fragments like 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 probability on omissions: First, omitting predictable words (which are more easily processed), avoids underutilizing processing resources. Second, inserting words before very unpredictable words distributes otherwise excessively high processing effort more uniformly. We test these predictions with a production study that supports both of these predictions. Our study makes two main contributions: First we develop an empirically motivated and supported account of fragment usage. Second, we extend previous evidence for information-theoretic processing constraints on language in two ways: We find predictability effects on omissions driven by extralinguistic context, whereas previous research mostly focused on effects of local linguistic context. Furthermore, we show that omissions of content words are also subject to information-theoretic well-formedness considerations. Previously, this has been shown mostly for the omission of function words.
与像“（乘客对出租车司机说的）完整句子”不同，说话者常常使用像“”这样的片段来传达信息。到目前为止，对于说话者为何以及在何种情况下有时更喜欢片段而非相应的完整句子，还没有全面且有实证支持的解释。我们提出一种信息论解释来对这种选择进行建模：说话者选择能在整个话语中最均匀地分布信息的编码方式，以便最有效地利用听者的处理资源（均匀信息密度理论，利维与耶格尔，2007年）。由于处理努力与单词的可预测性相关（黑尔，2001年），我们的解释预测了单词概率对省略的两种影响：第一，省略可预测的单词（更容易处理），避免处理资源利用不足。第二，在非常不可预测的单词之前插入单词，能更均匀地分配原本过高的处理努力。我们通过一项产出研究来检验这些预测，该研究支持了这两种预测。我们的研究有两个主要贡献：第一，我们提出了一个基于实证且得到支持的关于片段使用的解释。第二，我们从两个方面扩展了先前关于语言信息论处理限制的证据：我们发现由语言外语境驱动的对省略的可预测性影响，而先前的研究大多关注局部语言语境的影响。此外，我们表明实义词的省略也受到信息论合格性考量的制约。此前，这主要是针对功能词的省略所表明的情况。
