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Speakers tend to reduce the duration of words that they have heard or spoken recently. We examine the cognitive mechanisms behind duration variation, focusing on the contributions of speaker-internal constraints and audience design. In three experiments, we asked speakers to give instructions to listeners about how to move objects. In Experiment 1, the instruction was preceded by an auditory prime, which elicited reduced spoken word duration on a target noun in a speakerprivilege condition, and additional reduction on a determiner in a mutual-knowledge condition. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we tested the related hypothesis that the speaker's experience articulating the target leads to fluent processing above and beyond fluency in other processing, such as lexical selection. While prior articulation of the target led to greater reduction than just thinking about the word (Experiment 2a), saying the prime led to equal reduction as hearing the prime (Experiment 2b). The pattern of results leads to the conclusion that facilitated processing, perhaps brought on primarily as a function of having heard a word, is a major contributor to durational reduction in running speech. While audience design also has a small effect, its effect may also be mediated by processing fluency.

In this article, we examine the hypothesis that acoustic variation (e.g., reduced vs. prominent forms) results from audience design. Bard et al. (Journal of Memory and Language 42:1-22, 2000) have argued that acoustic prominence is unaffected by the speaker's estimate of addressee knowledge, using paradigms that contrast speaker and addressee knowledge. This question was tested in a novel paradigm, focusing on the effects of addressees' feedback about their understanding of the speaker's intended message. Speakers gave instructions to addressees about where to place objects (e.g., the teapot goes on red). The addressee either anticipated the object, by picking it up before the instruction, or waited for the instruction. For anticipating addressees, speakers began speaking more quickly and pronounced the word the with shorter duration, demonstrating effects of audience design. However, no effects appeared on the head noun (e.g., teapot), as measured by duration, amplitude, and perceived intelligibility. These results are consistent with a mechanism in which evidence about addressee understanding facilitates production processes, as opposed to triggering particular acoustic forms.

Language form varies as a result of the information being communicated. Some of the ways in which it varies include word order, referential form, morphological marking, and prosody. The relevant categories of information include the way a word or its referent have been used in context, for example, whether a particular referent has been previously mentioned, and whether it plays a topical role in the current utterance or discourse. We first provide a broad review of linguistic phenomena that are sensitive to information structure. We then discuss several theoretical approaches to explaining information structure: information status as a part of the grammar; information status as a representation of the speaker's and listener's knowledge of common ground and/or the knowledge state of other discourse participants; and the optimal systems approach. These disparate approaches reflect the fact that there is little consensus in the field about precisely which information status categories are relevant, or how they should be represented. We consider possibilities for future work to bring these lines of work together in explicit psycholinguistic models of how people encode information status and use it for language production and comprehension. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:403-413. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1234 This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language.

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