Abstract
Shillcock, Kirby, McDonald and Brew demonstrate
that there is a significant global relationship between
word form and meaning across a substantial part of the
lexicon of English. Here, 1705 words were studied to
establish how their history in the language related to
their participation in the correlation between meaning
and form. It was found that the meaning-form
correlation was significantly stronger for words with
earlier dates of entry into the lexicon, implying that an
individual word’s meaning-form correlation may
develop over time. Changes to individual words may
be contingent on the word meanings and word forms
in the rest of the lexicon.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference of the cognitive science society |
| Pages | 716-719 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Publication status | Published - 2001 |