How Efficiency Shapes Human Language, TICS 2019

Abstract

<p>Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we review studies that deploy formal tools from probability and information theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does, focusing on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntax. These studies show how apervasive pressure for efficiency guides the forms of natural language and indicate that a rich future for language research lies in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication and inference.</p>

Speakers and listeners exploit word order for communicative efficiency: A cross-linguistic investigation.

“…In the last two decades, Zipf's Principle of Least Effort has been formalized in informationtheoretic terms and evaluated positively against the structure of linguistic representations (see also Givón, 1979), with research in cognitive science confirming that language is shaped by a pressure to minimize complexity and communicate efficiently (Kemp et al, 2018;Gibson et al, 2019).…”

Short-term and working memory capacity and the language device: Chunking and parsing complexity

“…Taken together, these recent large-scale studies are lending compelling evidence to the general principles of economy (i.e., 'the law of least efforts'; Zipf, 1949) or efficiency (Hawkins, 2004;Gibson et al, 2019) and of compression or minimization (towards the tendency of MDD) in general language behavior (Roelcke, 2002), which are presumably all constrained by the limited capacity of STM/WM (Liu et al, 2017;Ferrer-i-Cancho, 2017;Chekaf et al, 2018;Ferrer-i-Cancho et al, 2019). Based on this basic assumption, the current paper aims to further demystify the distinction between STM and WM limitations as they relate to linguistic structures.…”

“…In recent years, the field of linguistics has witnessed rapid developments with the advent of modernized computational technology and big data. Both fields of language sciences and cognitive sciences have witnessed large-scale cross-linguistic corpus studies investigating the grammar dependency and locality phenomena across a large number of language databases (Gibson, 1998(Gibson, & 2000Gibson et al, 2019; also see Futrell, 2017;Liu, 2008;Liu et al, 2017 for more recent updates). Most of these studies have the fundamental assumption and the starting point of incorporating the universal constraint of WM capacity limitations (Ferrer-i-Cancho, 2017;Nicenboim et al, 2015).…”

“…Indeed, accumulating evidence from multiple perspectives seems to converge on the instrumental role of these STM/WM limitations in the emergence of variegated language structures and on the way they constrain or shape how human languages are acquired, evolved, comprehended, and produced. As argued in the first Section, compelling evidence has now emerged from recent studies in language typology and big-data corpus studies (Liu, 2008;Futrell et al, 2015;Gibson et al, 2019;Gomez-Rodriguez et al, 2019).…”

Cultural evolution of precise and consensual semantic conventions in a multiplayer gaming app

“…Here again, we lack precise metrics to quantify this phenomenon. Even though ambiguity may be advantageous for communication (when precision is costly or context provides sufficient information [3,11,12,24,25]), a convention linking a symbol with the same precise meaning for all users is, all else being equal, of clear benefit for information transmission [26]. The key function of the conventions linking symbols with meanings is the transmission of information.…”