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Zipf's Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication.

The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this "Law of Abbreviation" is a universal structural property of language. The Law of Abbreviati...

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Published in:Cognition Vol. 165; pp. 45 - 53
Main Authors: Kanwal, Jasmeen, Smith, Kenny, Culbertson, Jennifer, Kirby, Simon
Format: research Journal Article
Published: Elsevier B.V. Aug2017
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Aug2017
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      pub: Elsevier B.V.
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        10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.001
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        atl: Zipf's Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication.
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          Kanwal, Jasmeen
          Smith, Kenny
          Culbertson, Jennifer
          Kirby, Simon
        affil: Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
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          Communication
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      ab: The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the shorter it tends to be. He claimed that this "Law of Abbreviation" is a universal structural property of language. The Law of Abbreviation has since been documented in a wide range of human languages, and extended to animal communication systems and even computer programming languages. Zipf hypothesised that this universal design feature arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently-his famous Principle of Least Effort. In this study, we use a miniature artificial language learning paradigm to provide direct experimental evidence for this explanatory hypothesis. We show that language users optimise form-meaning mappings only when pressures for accuracy and efficiency both operate during a communicative task, supporting Zipf's conjecture that the Principle of Least Effort can explain this universal feature of word length distributions.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
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        research
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      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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