{"pk":26382,"title":"Simpler structure for more informative words: a longitudinal study","subtitle":null,"abstract":"As new concepts and discoveries accumulate over time, theamount of information available to speakers increases as well.One would expect that an utterance today would be more in-formative than an utterance 100 years ago (basing informationon surprisal; Shannon, 1948), given the increase in technol-ogy and scientific discoveries. This prediction, however, is atodds with recent theories regarding information in human lan-guage use, which suggest that speakers maintain a somewhatconstant information rate over time. Using the Google Ngramcorpus (Michel et al., 2011), we show for multiple languagesthat changes in lexical information (a unigram model) are actu-ally negatively correlated with changes in structural informa-tion (a trigram model), supporting recent proposals on infor-mation theoretic constraints.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"information rate"},{"word":"information theory"},{"word":"Google"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cr8c0x1","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Uriel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Priva","name_suffix":"","institution":"Brown University","department":""},{"first_name":"Emily","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gleason","name_suffix":"","institution":"Brown University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26382/galley/16018/download/"}]}