Quantitative Evaluation of Transmission of Meaning

As a step toward quantifying the processes whereby meaning is transmitted by language, an experiment was designed to facilitate observation of the process of verbalization by the sender as well as the process of comprehension by the receiver. Both sender and receiver characteristics were measured experimentally by confining the subject matter to ages and by restricting the available vocabulary to a small set of nouns. A model was then constructed for the entire process through which meaning is transmitted by a word, clarifying various causes of ambiguity and inaccuracy of transmission. The whole process was evaluated in terms of the amount of information and the r.m.s. error of transmission.