Optimize what?
•People want to minimize the chance that they will be misunderstood.
–Risk = P(misinterpreted) * cost(misinterpreted)
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•People want to minimize effort and/or talk faster
–Chairs, Cars
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•How to combine the two?
–A weighted sum.
–We allow each syllable to have a different weight
–Perhaps weight matches importance.
That’s the Bayesean risk.    Some syllables you will really want to execute correctly, because they are important to the conversation.  Others hardly matter.   You want to minimize the risk that the conversation as a whole will be misinterpreted, which means that you execute the important syllables correctly, even at the cost of messing up the unimportant ones.