A Noisy-Channel Account of Crosslinguistic Word-Order Variation

Psychological Science

Volumn 24, Issue 7, 2013, Pages 1079-1088

  Gibson, Edward ^a   Piantadosi, Steven T ^b   Brink, Kimberly ^a   Bergen, Leon ^a   Lim, Eunice ^a   Saxe, Rebecca ^a  

^a MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

Author keywords

cognition(s); language; linguistics; psycholinguistics

Indexed keywords

EID: 84879510922     PISSN: 09567976     EISSN: 14679280     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0956797612463705     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Aissen J.Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy.Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 2003;21:435-483.
2. Aylett M.,Turk A.The smooth signal redundancy hypothesis: A functional explanation for relationships between redundancy, prosodic prominence, and duration in spontaneous speech.Language and Speech. 2004;47:31-56.
3. Baker M.The atoms of language. New York, NY: Basic Books; 2001:.
4. Bouma G.Bidirectional optimality theory. Benz A.Mattausch J., ed. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins; 2011:169-190.
5. Brady T. F.,Konkle T.,Alvarez G. A.Compression in visual working memory: Using statistical regularities to form more efficient memory representations.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2009;138:487-502.
6. Chomsky N.Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York, NY: Praeger; 1986:.
7. Croft W.Typology and universals. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press; 2002:.
8. Dryer M. S.Case distinctions, rich verb agreement, and word order type (comments on Hawkins' paper).Theoretical Linguistics. 2002;28:151-158.
9. Dryer M. S.The world atlas of language structures. Haspelmath M.Dryer M. S.Gil D.Comrie B., ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; 2005:330-333.
10. Gell-Mann M.,Ruhlen M.The origin and evolution of word order.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 2011;108:17290-17295.
11. Gelman A.,Hill J.Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press; 2007:.
12. Gibson E.Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies.Cognition. 1998;68:1-76.
13. Gibson E.,Bergen L. Poster presented at the 25th annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference; 2012New York, NY; 2012.
14. Givón T.On understanding grammar. New York, NY: Academic Press; 1979:.
15. Goldin-Meadow S.,So W.,Ozyurek A.,Mylander C.The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 2008;105:9163-9168.
16. Greenberg J.Universals of language. Greenberg J., ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1963:73-113.
17. Hall M.,Ferreira V. S.,Mayberry R. I. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society; 2010St. Louis, MO; 2010.
18. Haspelmath M.Why is grammaticalization irreversible?.Linguistics. 1999;37:1043-1068.
19. Hawkins J.Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; 2004:.
20. Hockett C.A manual of phonology. Baltimore, MD: Waverly Press; 1955:.
21. Hockett C.The origin of speech.Scientific American. 1960;203 (3): 88-96.
22. Jackendoff R.Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 1972:.
23. Jaeger F.Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density.Cognitive Psychology. 2010;61:23-62.
24. Jakobson R.Selected writings. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton; 1936:23-71.
25. Kuperman V.,Stadhagen-Gonzales H.,Brysbaert M.Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30 thousand English words.Behavior Research Methods. in press;:.
26. Langus A.,Nespor M.Cognitive systems struggling for word order.Cognitive Psychology. 2010;60:291-318.
27. Levy R.Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics; 2008:234-243.
28. Levy R.,Bicknell K.,Slattery T.,Rayner K.Eye movement evidence that readers maintain and act on uncertainty about past linguistic input.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 2009;106:21086-21090.
29. Lindblom B.,Maddieson I.Phonetic universals in consonant systems Language, speech and mind. Li C.Hyman L., ed. London, England: Routledge; 1988:62-78.
30. MacWhinney B.Starting points.Language. 1977;53:152-168.
31. Marsaja I. G.Desa Kolok: A deaf village and its sign language in Bali, Indonesia. Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Ishara Press; 2008:.
32. Meir I.,Lifshitz A.,Ilkbasaran D.,Padden C. Paper presented at the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language; 2010Utrecht, The Netherlands; 2010.
33. Meir I.,Sandler W.,Padden C.,Aronoff M.Oxford handbook of deaf studies, language, and education. Marschark M.Spencer P., ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2010:267-280.
34. Newmeyer F. J.Language form and language function. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000a:.
35. Newmeyer F. J.The evolutionary emergence of language: Social function and the origins of linguistic form. Knight C.Studdert-Kennedy M.Hurford J. R., ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press; 2000b:372-388.
36. Paul H.Prinzipien der sprachgeschichte. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer; 1880:.
37. Piantadosi S.,Tily H.,Gibson E.Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 2011;108:3526-3529.
38. Piantadosi S.,Tily H.,Gibson E.The communicative function of ambiguity in language.Cognition. 2012;122:280-291.
39. Pinker S.,Bloom P.Natural language and natural selection [Target article and commentaries].Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 1990;13:707-784.
40. Sandler W.,Meir I.,Padden C.,Aronoff M.The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 2005;102:2661-2665.
41. Schouwstra M.,van Leeuwen A.,Marien N.,Smit M.,de Swart H.Proceedings of the 33rd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci11). Carlson L.Hoelscher C.Shipley T. F., ed. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society; 2011:1497-1502.
42. Senghas A.,Coppola M.,Newport E.,Supalla T.Proceedings of the 21st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Hughes E.Hughes M.Greenhill A., ed. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press; 1997:550-561.
43. Shannon C.A mathematical theory of communication.Bell System Technical Journal. 1948;27:623-656.
44. Smith P.Coding strategies in language.Information and Control. 1969;14:72-97.
45. Temperley D.Minimization of dependency length in written English.Cognition. 2007;105:300-333.
46. Tily H.The role of processing complexity in word order variation and change. Stanford, CA: Stanford University; 2010:.
47. Vennemann T.Syntax and semantics. Kimball J., ed. New York, NY: Academic Press; 1973:1-50.
48. Zipf G. K.Human behavior and the principle of least effort. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley; 1949:.