{"pk":28628,"title":"A predictability-distinctiveness trade-off in the historical emergence of word forms","subtitle":null,"abstract":"It has been proposed that language evolves under the joint con-straints of communicative expressivity and cognitive ease. Weexplore this idea in the historical emergence of word forms.We hypothesize that new word forms that enter the lexiconshould reflect a trade-off between predictability and distinc-tiveness. An emergent word form can be highly predictable ifit efficiently reuses elements from the existing word forms, re-sulting in low cognitive load. An emergent word form shouldalso be sufficiently distinctive from the existing lexicon, facil-itating communicative expressivity. We test our hypothesis byexamining the properties of 34,478 emergent word forms overthe past 200 years of Modern English. We show how wordforms at future time t + 1 are bounded statistically betweenn-gram generated word forms (highly predictable) and slangwords that are outside the standard lexicon (highly distinctive)at time t. Our work supports the view of cognitive economy inlexical emergence.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"word form; lexicon; lexical emergence; languageevolution; cognitive economy"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tb249bt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Aotao","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Waterloo","department":""},{"first_name":"Christian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ramiro","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Berkeley","department":""},{"first_name":"Yang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Toronto","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28628/galley/18499/download/"}]}