Information status relates to production, distribution, and comprehension

Abstract

MacDonald's (2013) paper makes two strong contributions to the psycholinguistics literature, in my opinion. First, it calls for a serious consideration of how cognitive pressures affect production processing, which is a necessary step for the development of mechanistic theories of language use. A second major contribution of the PDC is that it provides a theoretical explanation for the body of evidence showing that language comprehension is affected by the user's experience, for example where frequent structures and words are processed more easily than less frequent structures and words. The boldest portion of this proposal is that processing constraints on production are the primary source of typological distributions, which in turn affect comprehension biases. This is exactly the kind of theoretical claim that helps the field move forward, by being clear, simple, and far-reaching. At the same time, I argue that the PDC would benefit from greater consideration of information status. Language production is not primarily the retrieval of words and structures. Instead, these activities serve the speaker's goal, which is to communicate a meaning to the addressee. Likewise, linguistic meanings consist of more than identifying who did what. An important part of communication involves linking the utterance to information in the world and the linguistic context. Information varies across dimensions such as given vs. new, and topic vs. focus (for a review see Arnold et al., 2013). Information status is critical to understanding the PDC's proposed mechanisms, for two reasons. First, it is intimately related to the memory/attention cognitive mechanisms that are central to the reasoning behind the PDC. Second, these correlations highlight an important challenge for the PDC, which is to specify the distributional patterns that comprehenders use. I will illustrate these points with evidence of how information status is related to both (1) acoustic prominence and disfluency, and (2) syntactic structure and animacy.