![]() Further support for the contrast perception hypothesis comes from a re-analysis of previous work, which confirmed that color contrast elicits color overspecification when detected in a given display, but not when detected across monochrome trials. Experiment 1 revealed that speakers overspecify color adjectives in polychrome displays, whereas in mono-chrome displays they overspecified other properties that were contrastive. We tested the perceptual contrast hypothesis in three language-production experiments. ![]() The contrast perception heuristic supports efficient audience design, allowing speakers to produce referential expressions with minimum expenditure of cognitive resources, while facilitating the listener's visual search for the referent. We hypothesize that contrast perception works as a visual heuristic, such that when speakers perceive a significant degree of contrast in a visual context, they tend to produce the corresponding adjective to describe a referent. We discuss implications for theories of language learning and language change. Adults did not show better learning in the redundant condition, most likely because they were at ceiling in both conditions. Children in both conditions were similarly accurate in producing the novel word order, suggesting redundancy might have a differential effect on comprehension and production. We predict, and find, that children learning the redundant language learn to produce it, and show better comprehension of the novel thematic assignment than children learning the non-redundant language, despite having to learn an additional morpheme. We test these hypotheses in an artificial language learning study with children and adults, where either word order alone or both word order and case marking serve as cues for thematic assignment in a novel construction. This prediction is further motivated by the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis (Lupyan & Dale, 2010), which suggests that morphological complexity can arise due to the advantage redundancy might confer for child learners. In particular, we argue that redundant cues can facilitate learning, even when they make the language system more complicated. Here, we propose that redundancy can be functional for learning. It is especially surprising in light of the growing evidence on speakers' tendency to avoid redundant elements in production (omitting or reducing more predictable elements). ![]() The prevalence of redundancy in the world languages has long puzzled language researchers. Language production, the results inform linguistic typology, where similar patterns have been observed in obligatory (differential) case-marking. In addition to evidencing the role of communicative pressures during even the earliest stages of We discuss how speakers might achieve this type of trade-off. Experiments 2 and 3 find the same effect based on the plausibility of the intended grammatical function assignment, even when animacy is held constant. Experiment 1 observes this effect based on the animacy of the object. We find that Japanese speakers are more likely to produce case-marking when the properties of the sentence would otherwise bias comprehenders against the intended interpretation. Case-marking conveys information about the intended sentence interpretation, facilitating comprehension, but it also increases production effort. In three recall sentence production experiments, we investigate Japanese speakers' production of optional object case-marking. This contrasts with proposals that speakers' preferences during grammatical encoding reflect a trade-off between production ease and communicative goals. One broadly accepted view holds that grammatical encoding is primarily or exclusively affected by production ease, rather than communicative considerations. ![]() Grammatical encoding is one of the earliest stages in linguistic encoding.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |