Abstract
The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this "Law of Abbreviation" is a universal structural property of language. The Law of Abbreviation has since been documented in a wide range of human languages, and extended to animal communication systems and even computer programming languages. Zipf hypothesised that this universal design feature arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently-his famous Principle of Least Effort. In this study, we use a miniature artificial language learning paradigm to provide direct experimental evidence for this explanatory hypothesis. We show that language users optimise form-meaning mappings only when pressures for accuracy and efficiency both operate during a communicative task, supporting Zipf's conjecture that the Principle of Least Effort can explain this universal feature of word length distributions.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 45-52 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Cognition |
Volume | 165 |
Early online date | 8 May 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Aug 2017 |
Keywords
- Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation
- Principle of Least
- language universals
- efficient communication
- information theory
- artificial language learning
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Data reported in Jasmeen Kanwal's PhD Thesis Chapter 3
Kanwal, J. (Creator), Edinburgh DataShare, 23 Apr 2019
DOI: 10.7488/ds/2536, https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/33051
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