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

•Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation (ZLA): more frequent words tend to be shorter.•His hypothesis: ZLA due to speakers maximising accuracy while minimising effort.•We tested this hypothesis using an artificial language learning task.•We manipulated pressures for communicative accuracy and efficiency.•ZLA-li...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2017-08, Vol.165, p.45-52
Main Authors: Kanwal, Jasmeen, Smith, Kenny, Culbertson, Jennifer, Kirby, Simon
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Artificial language learning
Communication
Communications systems
Efficient communication
Female
Humans
Information theory
Language
Language universals
Learning
Male
Meaning
Middle Aged
Models, Psychological
Principle of Least Effort
Property
Young Adult
Zipf's Law
Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation
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Summary:•Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation (ZLA): more frequent words tend to be shorter.•His hypothesis: ZLA due to speakers maximising accuracy while minimising effort.•We tested this hypothesis using an artificial language learning task.•We manipulated pressures for communicative accuracy and efficiency.•ZLA-like lexicons only arose when both pressures were at play. 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.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.001