{"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,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21550/galley/11149/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21550/galley/14626/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21550/galley/21342/download/"}]}