{"pk":28635,"title":"Availability-Based Production Predicts Speakers’ Real-time Choices of MandarinClassifiers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Speakers often face choices as to how to structure their in-tended message into an utterance. Here we investigate the in-fluence of contextual predictability on the encoding of linguis-tic content manifested by speaker choice in a classifier lan-guage, Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, modifying a nounwith a numeral obligatorily requires the use of a classifier.While different nouns are compatible with different SPECIFICclassifiers, there is a GENERAL classifier that can be used withmost nouns. When the upcoming noun is less predictable,using a more specific classifier would reduce the noun’s sur-prisal, potentially facilitating comprehension (predicted to bepreferred under Uniform Information Density, Levy & Jaeger,2007), but the specific classifier may be dispreferred from aproduction standpoint if the general classifier is more easilyavailable (predicted by Availability-Based Production; Bock,1987; Ferreira & Dell, 2000). Here we report a picture-namingexperiment confirming two distinctive predictions made byAvailability-Based Production.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Language production; speaker choice; Chineseclassifiers; noun predictability"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8h77s696","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Meilin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""},{"first_name":"Roger","middle_name":"","last_name":"Levy","name_suffix":"","institution":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28635/galley/18506/download/"}]}