Department of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093, United States of America.
Department of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093, United States of America.
Cognition. 2022 Aug;225:105094. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105094. Epub 2022 Mar 24.
Human languages evolve to make communication more efficient. But efficiency creates trade-offs: what is efficient for speakers is not always efficient for comprehenders. How do languages balance these competing pressures? We focus on Zipf's meaning-frequency law, the observation that frequent wordforms have more meanings. On the one hand, this law could reflect a speaker-oriented pressure to reuse frequent wordforms. Yet human languages still maintain thousands of distinct wordforms, suggesting a countervailing, comprehender-oriented pressure. What balance of these pressures produces Zipf's meaning-frequency law? Using a neutral baseline, we find that frequent wordforms in real lexica have fewer homophones than predicted by their phonotactic structure: real lexica favor a comprehender-oriented pressure to reduce the cost of frequent disambiguation. These results help clarify the evolutionary drive for efficiency: human languages are subject to competing pressures for efficient communication, the relative magnitudes of which reveal how individual-level cognitive constraints shape languages over time.
人类语言的进化是为了使交流更加高效。但效率会带来权衡：对说话者有效的东西并不总是对听话者有效。语言是如何平衡这些相互竞争的压力的？我们专注于齐夫的意义-频率定律，即频繁的词形有更多的含义。一方面，这条定律可能反映了一种以说话者为导向的压力，即重复使用频繁的词形。然而，人类语言仍然保留着数千个不同的词形，这表明存在一种相反的、以听话者为导向的压力。是什么样的压力平衡产生了齐夫的意义-频率定律？我们使用一个中立的基线，发现真实词汇中的高频词比它们的语音结构所预测的同音词要少：真实词汇更倾向于以听话者为导向的压力，以降低高频词的歧义成本。这些结果有助于阐明效率的进化驱动力：人类语言受到高效交流的竞争压力的影响，这些压力的相对大小揭示了个体认知约束如何随着时间的推移塑造语言。
