Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Although noun class has been thought to lack function, it is suggested that gender-marked articles might help to enhance the predictability of upcoming nouns, much like prenominal adjectives. Supporting this idea, in a written paradigm Hoppe et al. (2025) showed that German speakers produced fewer prenominal adjectives than English speakers, but only when articles provided gender information (which English articles do not provide). Using a modified paradigm to examine this phenomenon in speech, we found that spoken prenominal adjectives were consistently produced across both informative and uninformative contexts. Instead, planned articulatory analyses reveal that in uninformative contexts, German speakers enhance, producing longer, more acoustically informative noun phrases at second mention than at first mention; in informative contexts, German speakers reduce, showing the opposite pattern, as do English speakers. We discuss these results in terms of how uncertainty about signals and the messages they communicate influence articulation in different languages and contexts.