Article Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "pk": 25604,
    "title": "Conceptual complexity and the evolution of the lexicon",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Although natural languages are generally arbitrary in their\nmapping of forms to meanings, there are some detectable biases\nin these mappings. For example, longer words tend to\nrefer to meanings that are more conceptually complex (what\nwe refer to as a complexity bias; Lewis, Sugarman, & Frank,\n2014). The origins of this bias remain an open question, however.\nOne hypothesis is that this lexical regularity is the product\nof a complexity bias in individual speakers, and that it\nemerges in the lexicon over the course of language evolution.\nIn the present work, we use an iterated learning paradigm to explore\nthis proposal. Speakers learned labels of varying lengths\nfor objects of varying complexity, and then were asked to recall\nthe learned labels. We then presented the labels that participants\nproduced to a new set of speakers, iterating this procedure\nacross generations. The results suggest the presence of a\ncomplexity bias that guides language change but that interacts\nwith pressures for simplicity",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "lexicon; communication; language evolution; iterated\nlearning."
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0s20w8hz",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Molly",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Lewis",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Michael",
            "middle_name": "C",
            "last_name": "Frank",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Stanford University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2015-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25604/galley/15228/download/"
        }
    ]
}