Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One major class of approaches to explaining the distribu-tion of linguistic forms is rooted in communicative effi-ciency. For theories in which an utterance’s communica-tive efficiency is itself dependent on the distribution oflinguistic forms in the language, however, it is less clearhow to make distributional predictions that escape circu-larity. I propose an approach for these cases that involvesiterating between speaker and listener in the RationalSpeech Act theory. Characteristics of the fixed points ofthis iterative process constitute the distributional predic-tions of the theory. Through computer simulation I applythis approach to the well-studied case of predictability-sensitive optional function word omission for the theoryof Uniform Information Density, and show that the ap-proach strongly predicts the empirically observed nega-tive correlation between phrase onset probability and rateof function word use.