What's worth talking about? Information theory reveals how children balance informativeness with ease of production

Bannard, ORCID: 0000-0001-5579-5830, Rosner, M and Matthews, D (2017) What's worth talking about? Information theory reveals how children balance informativeness with ease of production. Psychological Science, 28 (7). pp. 954-966.

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Abstract

Of all the things a person could say in a given situation, 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. In this article, we quantify this tendency using information-theoretic measures and report on a study in which we tested the counterintuitive prediction that children will produce words that have a 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. In an initial experiment (N = 31) and in a replication (N = 13), 3-year-olds 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 informativeness with a competing drive to ease production.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	information theory, pragmatics, child language, language production, open data, open materials
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	27 Feb 2017 12:12
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 07:15
DOI:	10.1177/2F0956797617699848
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3006062