Article Instance

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{
    "pk": 21550,
    "title": "Letter shapes phonology:  Feature economy and informativeness in 43 writing systems",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Differentiating letter shapes accurately is an increasingly crucial competence. Are letters as distinctive as they could be? We used a unique dataset of crowdsourced letter descriptions across 43 writing systems to produce a comprehensive typology of letter shapes for these diverse scripts. We extracted from 19,591 letter classifications, contributed by 1,683 participants, enough features to provide a unique description of all letters in each system. We show that scripts, compared to phoneme inventories, are feature-extensive: they use additional features to do what could be done with a lower number of features, used more efficiently. Compared to 516 phoneme inventories from the P-base dataset, our 43 scripts have lower feature economy (fewer symbols for a given number of features) and lower feature informativeness (a less balanced distribution of feature values). Letter shapes, we argue, having more degrees of freedom than speech sounds, use features in a more wasteful way.",
    "language": null,
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Anthropology; Linguistics; Culture; Externally-supported cognition; Phonology; Reading; Vision; Cross-cultural analysis; Cross-linguistic analysis"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Oral Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0zm783tr",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Yoolim",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Kim",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Wellesley College",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Marc",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Allassonnière-Tang",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "CNRS",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Helena",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Miton",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Santa Fe Institute",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Olivier",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Morin",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "PSL University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2024-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
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            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21550/galley/11149/download/"
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            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21550/galley/14626/download/"
        },
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            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21550/galley/21342/download/"
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}