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Can information theory explain early word choice*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Roy D. Pea
Roy D. Pea
Affiliation:
The Rockefeller University
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Abstract

One problem of interest in child language study has been specifying what features of the speech situation determine what children will say. Several cognitively based approaches to child language development have proposed principles of ‘informativeness’ to explain the child's choice of word(s). These principles predict that the child will choose the ‘most informative’ element of a situation and encode it in speech. Detailed inspection of this view reveals that the notion of ‘informativeness’ is not rigorously denned as in information theory, and would require the development of formal semantic and pragmatic information theories. Simpler accounts of available data do not require the notion of ‘information’.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , October 1979 , pp. 397 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by Grant No. 15125 awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health. I would like to thank John Dore, Patricia Greenfield, and George Miller for comments on earlier versions of this paper, one of which was presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, San Francisco, California, 15–18 March, 1979. Address for correspondence: Department of Experimental Psychology, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, New York, 10021, U.S.A.

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