Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite their diversity, languages around the world share aconsistent set of properties and distributional regularities. Forexample, the distribution of word frequencies, the distributionof syntactic dependency lengths, and the presence of ambigu-ity are all remarkably consistent across languages. We dis-cuss a framework for studying how these system-level proper-ties emerge from local, in-the-moment interactions of rational,pragmatic speakers and listeners. To do so, we derive a novelobjective function for measuring the communicative efficiencyof linguistic systems in terms of the interactions of speakersand listeners. We examine the behavior of this objective ina series of simulations focusing on the communicative func-tion of ambiguity in language. These simulations suggest thatrational pragmatic agents will produce communicatively effi-cient systems and that interactions between such agents pro-vide a framework for examining efficient properties of lan-guage structure and use more broadly.