{"pk":49142,"title":"Soft production preferences emerge from a bottleneck on memory","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Soft production preferences are a key feature of incremental language production, yet they lack a well-defined unified explanatory theory. Here, we propose an information-theoretic theory of availability effects grounded in the notion of lossy-context working memory, which takes the form of a cost function that can be applied to any computational-level model of language production. We show that production policies that minimize this cost function naturally give rise to key soft preferences observed in empirical data, including frequency bias, heavy-NP shift, and agreement attraction. We then show a novel prediction made by the model regarding the entropy of arguments' thematic roles, and show that this effect holds in corpus data.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d87v78d","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Neil","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rathi","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Richard","middle_name":"","last_name":"Futrell","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Irvine","department":""},{"first_name":"Dan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Jurafsky","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49142/galley/37103/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49142/galley/38648/download/"}]}