Accessibility-driven Language Production

Our work on accessibility (Harmon & Kapatsinski, 2017) and my dissertation work (Harmon, 2019), demonstrates that high accessibility of a form results in the extension of that form to novel related contexts, an extension that is deemed less appropriate by the speakers when the production pressures are eliminated.

My work also suggests that frequency of a form in the learner’s experience has seemingly contradictory effects in production and comprehension. In comprehension, frequent forms become restricted to a meaning with which they co-occur, a process known as entrenchment. In production, forms that frequently co-occur with a meaning are likely to be extended to novel related contexts. These opposing forces represent a dissociation between comprehension and production which has been observed in child language acquisition (e.g., Naigles & Gelman, 1995; Gershkoff-Stowe & Smith, 1997), but was thought to be something children grew out of. My work has demonstrated that the same effects hold in adult language use. I have further shown that this effect of frequency on extension is mediated by its effect on form accessibility given top-down semantic cues. Crucially, when frequent and infrequent forms are made equally accessible, speakers no longer prefer to extend frequent forms.

The findings are important in two ways. First, my results reconcile contradictory findings in the literature. Frequency has been argued to result in both overgeneralization/extension (MacWhinney, 1978; Pinker, 1984; Slobin, 1971; Bybee, 2003) and entrenchment (Braine & Brooks, 1995; Xu & Tenenbaum, 2007). I show that it results in both, with extension in production and entrenchment in comprehension. Second, the work provides explanation for certain patterns of language structure and language change. The correlation between frequency and polysemy (e.g., higher number of meanings for have compared to possess) has been known for many years—since Zipf (1945)—but the direction of causality has been controversial (Bybee, 2003). My work shows, for the first time, that frequency can cause the extension of a form to novel related meanings, in turn, resulting in polysemy as well as productivity of accessible forms.

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See also: Harmon, Z. 2019. Accessibility, Language Production, and Language Change. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon).[pdf]