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REDUNDANCY

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P244

2025-10-05

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REDUNDANCY

Where the presence of a linguistic or phonetic feature does not play a necessary part in identifying a unit of language, it is said to be redundant. There is redundancy at all levels of language; indeed, language as a phenomenon is often described as highly redundant. For example, several acoustic-phonetic cues serve to distinguish the sound /p/ from the sound /b/. If we can show that a listener largely relies on differences of Voice Onset Time, the other cues can be regarded as redundant. Likewise, in a sentence such as The passengers are embarking, both passengers and are are marked for plural number. Strictly speaking, it is only necessary to mark one in order to convey the relevant information.

Redundancy assists the listener or reader in processing the signal accurately, especially in conditions of noise where there is a high level of interference or where a text is degraded. It similarly assists those who have impaired vision or hearing.

It has been suggested that redundancy gives language a degree of predictability, enabling the listener or reader to anticipate what words will come next. However, it is by no means clear that this occurs as part of normal processing. It seems more likely that redundancy is used to check on what is being heard or read rather than to anticipate what is to come.

See also: Noise, Under specification