Yoon Mi Oh

This project aims to understand how individual speakers’ sociolinguistic profile and the linguistic complexity of the languages they speak influence their information encoding strategies. In other words, how much effect of individual speakers’ sociolinguistic factors and linguistic and typological factors of languages do we observe in terms of speakers’ information rate? We disentangle and assess the effect of sociolinguistic factors of speakers at the individual and group level and the effect of typological factors of languages on the information encoding strategies of individual speakers. We also compare the information encoding strategies of speakers across WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) and non-WEIRD languages. The results of the proposed research can shed light on (i) understanding individual speakers’ information encoding strategy; and (ii) employing large language models for research on small and endangered languages.