Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

According to the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis, speakers prefer utterances in which information is spread evenly across the linguistic signal. Despite abundant empirical evidence for UID across multiple levels of linguistic representations, the reasons for why UID effects arise are less well understood. Here we explore a listener-oriented hypothesis that a communicative need to facilitate listener comprehension contributes to UID effects. To assess this possibility, we test whether and how information distribution patterns in naturalistic dialogues are shaped by individual differences in speakers' socio-cognitive traits. We hypothesize that if UID effects stem at least partly from speakers taking listeners' needs into account, then speakers with greater socio-cognitive abilities should exhibit stronger UID effects. Using corpus data, we show that UID is modulated by the speaker's ability to infer others' mental states, supporting the listener-oriented hypothesis of UID. We discuss the implications of the current work for refining theories of UID and, more broadly, for incorporating social cognition into accounts of the cognitive mechanisms underlying language processing.