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Computer Science @ Rochester
Friday, May 09, 2008
12:30 PM
CSB 209
Carlos Gómez Gallo
University of Rochester
Syntactic Production across Clauses
Language production research has focused on planning at the lexical and syntactic levels. Consequently, little is known about speakers' strategies for distributing information across multiple utterances. We present evidence that (a) the overall amount of information in an intended message affects how speakers distribute that information across clauses, and (b) speakers have relatively early access to (at least an estimate of) message complexity, specifically before word retrieval. The observed effect is unexpected for competing theories of sentence production based on availability or macro-propositional accounts. We discuss these findings in an information theoretic context coupled with a sketch of a model of limited resources at the level of macro-propositional planning.