Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present an experimental study investigating the role ofinformation-theoretic factors in determining patterns of redun-dancy and focus in language and other communication sys-tems. Pairs of participants played a simple communicationgame using a non-linguistic visual medium to send messagesto each other. We manipulated noise, effort, and time pres-sures and measured message length, redundancy, and accuracy.Participants behaved as predicted based on an information-theoretic model, with message length and redundancy varyingaccording to circumstance, but accuracy remaining constant.