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{
    "pk": 29007,
    "title": "Information Distribution Depends on Language-Specific Features",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Language can be thought of as a code: A system for packaging a speakers thoughts into a signal that a listener mustdecode to recover some intended meaning. If language is a near-optimal code, then speakers should structure informationin their utterances to minimizes the impact of errors in production or comprehension. To examine the distribution ofinformation within utterances, we apply information-theoretic methods to a diverse set of languages in various spoken andwritten corpora. We find reliably non-uniform and cross-linguistically variable information distributions across languages.These distributions are consistent across contexts, and are predictable from typological features, most notably canonicalword order. However, when we include even a small amount of predictive context (bigrams or trigrams), the language-specific shapes disappear, and all languages are characterized by uniform information distribution. Despite cross-linguisticvariability in communicative codes, speakers structure their utterances to preserve uniform information distribution andsupport successful communication.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Poster Presentations with Abstracts",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2zc7p9vf",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Josef",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Klafka",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Chicago",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Dan",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Yurovsky",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Chicago",
            "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/29007/galley/18878/download/"
        }
    ]
}