Information structure: linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches.

Language form varies as a result of the information being communicated. Some of the ways in which it varies include word order, referential form, morphological marking, and prosody. The relevant categories of information include the way a word or its referent have been used in context, for example, whether a particular referent has been previously mentioned, and whether it plays a topical role in the current utterance or discourse.

Audience design affects acoustic reduction via production facilitation.

In this article, we examine the hypothesis that acoustic variation (e.g., reduced vs.