The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers are subject to a communicative pressure to distribute information evenly within utterances, minimising surprisal variance. While this hypothesis has been tested empirically, prior studies are limited exclusively to text-only inputs, abstracting away from the perceptual context in which utterances are produced. In this work, we present the first computational study of UID in visually grounded settings. We estimate surprisal using multilingual vision-and-language models over image–caption data in 30 languages and visual storytelling data in 13 languages, together spanning 11 families. We find that grounding on perception consistently smooths the distribution of information, increasing both global and local uniformity across typologically diverse languages compared to text-only settings. In visual narratives, grounding in both image and discourse contexts has additional effects, with the strongest surprisal reductions occurring at the onset of discourse units. Overall, this study takes a first step towards modelling the temporal dynamics of information flow in ecologically plausible, multimodal language use, and finds that grounded language exhibits greater information uniformity, supporting a context-sensitive formulation of UID.

Animacy is a semantic feature of nominals and follows a hierarchy: personal pronouns > human > animate > inanimate. In several languages, animacy imposes hard constraints on grammar. While it has been argued that these constraints may emerge from universal soft tendencies, it has been difficult to provide empirical evidence for this conjecture due to the lack of data annotated with animacy classes. In this work, we first propose a method to reliably classify animacy classes of nominals in 11 languages from 5 families, leveraging multilingual large language models (LLMs) and word sense disambiguation datasets. Then, through this newly acquired data, we verify that animacy displays consistent cross-linguistic tendencies in terms of preferred morphosyntactic constructions, although not always in line with received wisdom: animacy in nouns correlates with the alignment role of agent, early positions in a clause, and syntactic pivot (e.g., for relativisation), but not necessarily with grammatical subjecthood. Furthermore, the behaviour of personal pronouns in the hierarchy is idiosyncratic as they are rarely plural and relativised, contrary to high-animacy nouns.