Bannard, C., Rosner, M. and Matthews, D. orcid.org/0000-0003-3562-9549 (2017) What’s worth talking about? Information theory reveals how children balance informativeness and ease of production. Psychological Science, 28 (7). pp. 954-966. ISSN 0956-7976
Abstract
Of all the things we could say, what determines what is worth saying? Greenfield’s principle of informativeness states that, right from the onset of language, humans selectively comment on whatever they find unexpected. We quantify this tendency using information theoretic measures, and test the counterintuitive prediction that children will produce words that are low frequency given the context because these will be most informative. Using corpora of child directed speech, we identified adjectives that varied in how informative (i.e., unexpected) they were given the noun they modified. Three-year-olds (N=31, replication N=13) heard an experimenter use these adjectives to describe pictures. The children’s task was then to describe the pictures to another person. As the information content of the experimenter’s adjective increased, so did children’s tendency to comment on the feature that adjective had encoded. Furthermore, our analyses suggest that children balance this informativeness with a competing drive to ease production.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 The Author(s). This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Psychological Science. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Information theory; pragmatics; child language; language production |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BRITISH ACADEMY (THE) SG131952 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 08 Mar 2017 12:33 |
Last Modified: | 18 Aug 2023 10:40 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Association for Psychological Science |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0956797617699848 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:113235 |