Language Change

Point of Contact: Joel Wallenberg

Collaborators: Christine Cuskley, Rachael Bailes

Description: Our project applies Information Theory to the social nature of human language and its cognitive scaffolding, and examines how people subconsciously structure the spread of information when they speak and write. In language, information is contained in small units (words), but also in larger units (e.g., phrases). More unexpected words provide more information: if I say cat you will probably imagine a generic version of the common animal. But if I say ocelot, that provides you with a lot more information, and thus reduces your uncertainty about what I'm referring to.

Previous research has suggested that language users will spread information evenly when they speak or write to make successful communication (with hearers or readers) more likely. Rather than putting all the most informative words at the beginning or end of a sentence, language users prefer to scatter them evenly across a sentence. Crucially, they do this for people they are communicating with, as part of a phenomenon known as audience design: they are curating their utterances for those who are listening. More evenly spread information makes for a higher likelihood that a hearer will understand an utterance - even if there is interference or noise in transmission.

We suggest that humans have evolved to subconsciously manipulate language in this way because language is fundamentally social: it strengthens the social relationship between a speaker and interlocutor, and must be designed for what an audience or interlocutor can most easily hear, understand, and remember. Language is also fundamentally cognitive, and evolved to take advantage of the communicative strategies that human brains use to transmit information within themselves. To show this, the project will focus on the distribution of information across sentences in different contexts.