{"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/"}]}