Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Jessie Jinyu Shi (University College London)

Title: Adapting to children: information redundancy in language production

Abstract: Previous research in efficient communication proposed that speakers operate under a principle of informativity, making production choices that favour the omission of highly predictable content. However, when talking to children, speakers produce signals that are redundant to maximize the understandability of their speech. Much of this research was conducted on the linguistic forms that speakers employ, but not on the propositional meaning being conveyed. Therefore, the current study aimed to investigate whether speakers adjust the informativity of the content they selected depending on the global properties of their listeners. We first collected what speakers would say about a set of paintings to a child and an adult, and then gave their responses to a separate group of adult comprehenders to rate the informativity of the content. We found that the descriptions directed to the child were shorter in sentence length, contained fewer declaratives, and rated to be less informative compared to those directed to the adult. Our findings are one of the first to show that the identity of the audience not only affects speakers’ choice on how to formulate their messages, but also their decision on what messages to communicate.