Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Speakers often have more than one way to express the same meaning. What generalprinciples govern speaker choice in the face of optionality when near semanticallyinvariant alternation exists? Studies have shown that optional reduction in language issensitive to contextual predictability, where the more predictable a linguistic unit is, themore likely it gets reduced. Yet it is unclear whether speaker choice is geared towardaudience design, or toward facilitating production. Here we argue that for a differentoptionality phenomenon, namely classifier choice in Mandarin Chinese, UniformInformation Density and at least one plausible variant of availability-based productionmake opposite predictions regarding the relationship between the predictability of theupcoming material and speaker choices. In a corpus analysis of Mandarin Chinese, weshow that the distribution of speaker choices supports the availability-based productionaccount, and not Uniform Information Density.