Communicative Efficiency in Child Mandarin

Communicative Efficiency in Child Mandarin Jane Tsay James Myers Institute of Linguistics Institute of Linguistics National Chung Cheng University National Chung Cheng University Taiwan Taiwan Lngtsay15@gmail.com Lngmyers@ccu.edu.tw Abstract Communicative efficiency in this study is quantified both as transmission efficiency and as representation efficiency, adopting an explicit method proposed by Myers, Tsay and Su (2011). Transmission efficiency is defined as the amount of information transmitted during a specific time and is measured by the rate of propositions per second. On the other hand, representation efficiency is defined as the amount of information represented in a specific grammatical unit (e.g., syllable) and is measured by the rate of propositions per syllable. In this study, we are especially interested in the development of child language in communicative efficiency. Narratives were elicited from 35 seven-year-old Mandarin- speaking children from an elementary school in Taipei using the picture storybook “Frog, where are you?” (Mayer 1969). It was found that, compared with the results of 29 adults (mean age 37 years), the representation efficiency of the children was the same as that of the adults, although their transmission efficiency was significantly lower than that of the adults. The results show that the children’s grammatical structure in speech already conveys the same amount of meaning or information as adults by the age of seven when their articulation is still much slower than the adults. 1 Introduction 1.1 Defining communicative efficiency The primary goal of human language is to communicate. However, how communicative efficiency of a human language can be quantified is not a simple question. For example, articulation rate has been widely used to assess children’s speech skills (e.g., Goldman-Eisler, 1968), children with stuttering problems or other specific language impairments (e.g., Hall et al., 1999; Erdemir, et al., 2018), and, second language proficiency (e.g., Bergmann et al., 2015). Since the rate of articulation is measured by the number of syllables per minute of the time spent in vocal activity (pauses subtracted out) (Goldman-Eisler, 1968) or the number of syllables or phones per second excluding pauses and disfluent segments (Erdemir et al., 2018), it is concerned only with the speed of articulation. However, language communication is not just about speed. More importantly, it is about “what” (meaning) is being communicated. The rate of articulation does not reflect how much linguistic information, especially meaning as expressed by propositions, is conveyed or represented in a linguistic unit like a syllable. Therefore, Myers, Tsay, and Su (2011) propose that in order to capture a complete picture of communicative efficiency, both representation efficiency and transmission efficiency should be taken into consideration. Representation efficiency is defined as the number of propositions “represented” per syllable and transmission efficiency is defined as the number of propositions “transmitted” per second. 1.2 Previous studies on communicative efficiency The study of Myers et al. (2011) was originally inspired by Bellugi and Fisher (1972) which focuses on a cross-modality comparison between English and American Sign Language (ASL). Bellugi and Fisher (1972) compared the narratives in English and ASL by …

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