Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The combinatorial expressivity of natural language enables speakers to communicate a single idea in myriad ways. Howdo speakers decide which utterance to use? Under the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis, speakers shouldplan their utterances to minimize listener comprehension difficulty by spreading out new information, for example, byusing complementizers or avoiding contractions before high-surprisal content. We explore how UID behaviors may resultfrom pragmatic considerations (e.g., social reasoning in context) using a computational pragmatics model. We showthat artificial pragmatic agents communicating under noise conditions exhibit key UID effects: (A) speakers provide cuesbefore high surprisal content, (B) given a UID-cue, listeners infer oncoming content is high-surprisal, (C) synthetic corporagenerated from speakers reflects a signature UID effect: a positive relationship between likelihood of optional elementsand surprisal of oncoming content. Thus, UID may follow from more general principles of pragmatic communication inthe presence of noise.