具体性
语言生产
认知
按频率列出的单词列表
心理语言学
计算机科学
认知心理学
人际交往
背景(考古学)
心理学
语言学
集合(抽象数据类型)
沟通
生物
古生物学
哲学
神经科学
程序设计语言
作者
Li Y,Fritz Breithaupt,Thomas T. Hills,Ziyong Lin,Yanyan Chen,Cynthia S. Q. Siew,Ralph Hertwig
标识
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2220898120
摘要
Like biological species, words in language must compete to survive. Previously, it has been shown that language changes in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how the survival of existing word forms can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties that impact language production. In the first study, we analyzed the survival of words in the context of interpersonal communication. We analyzed data from a large-scale serial-reproduction experiment in which stories were passed down along a transmission chain over multiple participants. The results show that words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, more arousing, and more emotional are more likely to survive retellings. We reason that the same trend might scale up to language evolution over multiple generations of natural language users. If that is the case, the same set of psycholinguistic properties should also account for the change of word frequency in natural language corpora over historical time. That is what we found in two large historical-language corpora (Study 2): Early acquisition, concreteness, and high arousal all predict increasing word frequency over the past 200 y. However, the two studies diverge with respect to the impact of word valence and word length, which we take up in the discussion. By bridging micro-level behavioral preferences and macro-level language patterns, our investigation sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying word competition.
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