People tend to distribute information evenly in language production for better and clearer communication. In this study, we compared essays written by second language learners with various native language (L1) backgrounds to investigate how they distribute information in their non-native language (L2) production. Analyses of surprisal and constancy of entropy rate indicated that writers with higher L2 proficiency can reduce the expected uncertainty of language production while still conveying informative content. However, the uniformity of information distribution showed less variability among different groups of L2 speakers, suggesting that this feature may be universal in L2 essay writing and less affected by L2 writers' variability in L1 background and L2 proficiency.

翻译：人们倾向于在语言产出中均匀分布信息，以实现更优、更清晰的交流。本研究通过比较不同母语背景的二语学习者所撰写的作文，探究了他们在非母语产出中如何分布信息。对信息熵的惊奇度与恒定率的分析表明，二语水平较高的写作者能够降低语言产出的预期不确定性，同时仍能传递信息丰富的内容。然而，信息分布的均匀性在不同二语学习者群体间表现出较小的变异性，这表明该特征在二语作文写作中可能具有普遍性，且较少受到二语写作者母语背景差异和二语水平变化的影响。