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How cognitive selection affects language change
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Li, Ying, Breithaupt, Fritz, Hills, Thomas Trenholm, Lin, Ziyong, Chen, Yanyan, Siew, Cynthia S. W. and Hertwig, Ralph (2023) How cognitive selection affects language change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121 (1). e2220898120. doi:10.1073/pnas.2220898120 ISSN 0027-8424.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220898120
Abstract
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.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | ||||||
SWORD Depositor: | Library Publications Router | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Psycholinguistics, Language acquisition, Cognitive grammar , Interpersonal communication, Language and languages, Cognition | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | ||||||
Publisher: | National Academy of Sciences | ||||||
ISSN: | 0027-8424 | ||||||
Official Date: | 27 December 2023 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 121 | ||||||
Number: | 1 | ||||||
Article Number: | e2220898120 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.2220898120 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 22 January 2024 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 22 January 2024 | ||||||
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