{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/word-forms-not-just-their-lengths-are","title":"Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized for efficient communication","arxiv_id":"1703.01694","date":"2017-03-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Stephan C. Meylan","Thomas L. Griffiths"],"abstract":"The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of\nits use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that\nholds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one\naspect of a much more general property of words: how distinctive they are with\nrespect to other words in a language. Distinctiveness plays a critical role in\nrecognizing words in fluent speech, in that it reflects the strength of\npotential competitors when selecting the best candidate for an ambiguous\nsignal. Phonological information content, a measure of a word's string\nprobability under a statistical model of a language's sound or character\nsequences, concisely captures distinctiveness. Examining large-scale corpora\nfrom 13 languages, we find that distinctiveness significantly outperforms word\nlength as a predictor of frequency. This finding provides evidence that\nlisteners' processing constraints shape fine-grained aspects of word forms\nacross languages.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01694v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.01694v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"word-forms-not-just-their-lengths-are","repo_url":"https://github.com/smeylan/pic-analysis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}