Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper explores how speakers choose between two utterance alternatives with similar syntactic properties and distinct yet related meanings. We consider the interaction of two speaker pressures: to mention accessible lexical items early in the utterance and to mention informative content early in the utterance, the latter of which is explicitly predicted by an incremental Rational Speech Act (IRSA) model. In Exp. 1, we observed a significant effect of accessibility on utterance choice in an online spoken production task, which elicited descriptions of the relationship between two entities using a provided verb. We found that making entities more accessible via foregrounding led speakers to mention them earlier. In Exp. 2, an interactive production task, both informativity and foregrounding were manipulated. While IRSA predicts more informative content to be mentioned earlier in the sentence, we observed neither significant effects of informativity nor of accessibility. Consistent with recent work on Good-Enough theories of production, we conclude that even when two sentences are not entirely meaning-equivalent, production choices can be affected by lexical accessibility; the pressure to mention informative material early, however, should be investigated further