{"pk":26901,"title":"Language-users choose short words in predictive contextsin an artificial language task","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Zipf (1935) observed that word length is inversely proportionalto word frequency in the lexicon. He hypothesised that thiscross-linguistically universal feature was due to the Principleof Least Effort: language-users align form-meaning mappingsin such a way that the lexicon is optimally coded for efficientinformation transfer. However, word frequency is not the onlyreliable predictor of word length: Piantadosi, Tily, and Gib-son (2011) show that a word’s predictability in context is infact more strongly correlated with word length than word fre-quency. Here, we present an artificial language learning studyaimed at investigating the mechanisms that could give rise tosuch a distribution at the level of the lexicon. We find thatparticipants are more likely to use an ambiguous short form inpredictive contexts, and distinct long forms in surprising con-texts, only when they are subject to the competing pressures tocommunicate accurately and efficiently. These results supportthe hypothesis that language-users are driven by a least-effortprinciple to restructure their input in order to align word lengthwith information content, and this mechanism could thereforeexplain the global pattern observed at the level of the lexicon.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Information theory; Efficient communication; Ar-tificial language learning; Uniform Information Density"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cs26777","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jasmeen","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kanwal","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Kenny","middle_name":"","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Jennifer","middle_name":"","last_name":"Culbertson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Simon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kirby","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26901/galley/16537/download/"}]}