UC Santa Cruz

The role of contextual predictability in language processing and production has gained increasing attention in recent years, but in production remains relatively understudied above the phonetic/phonological levels. Further, the existence and source of predictability effects is still contested, and it remains unclear which phenomena these effects extend to, as well as what their explanatory range is (Jurafsky, 2003). I present two experiments which investigate the role of contextual predictability in the choice to omit optional subjects in Russian. The results demonstrate that when other predictors of referential expression choice are taken into account, contextual predictability, conditioned on preceding context, remains a significant predictor of whether an optional subject is pronounced or elided in colloquial text or speech. Contextual predictability conditioned on following context, in contrast, does not appear to exert significant influence after effects of preceding context are controlled for.