Communicative efficiency in language production: Optional case-marking in Japanese Chigusa Kurumada a,⇑ , T. Florian Jaeger b a University of Rochester, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, United States b University of Rochester, Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Linguistics, and Computer Science, United States article info Article history: Received 19 November 2013 revision received 8 March 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Language production Communication Robust information transfer Production ease Optional case-marking Japanese abstract Grammatical encoding is one of the earliest stages in linguistic encoding. One broadly accepted view holds that grammatical encoding is primarily or exclusively affected by pro- duction ease, rather than communicative considerations. This contrasts with proposals that speakers’ preferences during grammatical encoding reflect a trade-off between production ease and communicative goals. In three recall sentence production experiments, we investigate Japanese speakers’ production of optional object case-marking. Case-marking conveys information about the intended sentence interpretation, facilitating comprehen- sion, but it also increases production effort. We find that Japanese speakers are more likely to produce case-marking when the properties of the sentence would otherwise bias com- prehenders against the intended interpretation. Experiment 1 observes this effect based on the animacy of the object. Experiments 2 and 3 find the same effect based on the plausibil- ity of the intended grammatical function assignment, even when animacy is held constant. We discuss how speakers might achieve this type of trade-off. In addition to evidencing the role of communicative pressures during even the earliest stages of language production, the results inform linguistic typology, where similar patterns have been observed in obligatory (differential) case-marking. Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction One of the central questions in research on language production is the extent to which language production is affected by our communicative goals. While there is little doubt that those goals affect what message we wish to con- vey, it is less clear to what extent communicative goals affect how we convey that message. Specifically, the ques- tion still under debate is to what extent the linguistic encoding processes underlying language production are affected by speakers’ goal to successfully convey their message. On the one hand, it is certainly true that some aspects of the planning and decision processes involved in linguistic encoding are affected by the goal to be understood. The fact that we tend to write and speak in a language intelligi- ble to our intended audience illustrates this quite clearly. Similarly, when conversing on a windy mountain peak, we tend to speak louder than when conversing in a quiet room. On the other hand, it is less clear to what extent communicative goals affect linguistic encoding beyond broad adjustments to language choice and speech styles. These encoding processes are generally assumed to involve several largely automatic stages (Bock & Levelt, 1994; Levelt, 1989). Here, we focus on one of the earliest stages in linguistic encoding, grammatical encoding. In particular, we focus on the assembly of a sentence’s morpho-syntactic structure. Grammatical encoding is of particular interest because, according to the predominant view in our field, it is primarily or exclusively affected by production ease http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.03.003 0749-596X/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: ckurumada@bcs.rochester.edu (C. Kurumada). Journal of Memory and Language xxx (2015) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Memory and Language journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jml Please cite this article in press as: Kurumada, C., & Jaeger, T. F. Communicative efficiency in language production: Optional case-marking in Japanese. Journal of Memory and Language (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.03.003