“…As more studies highlight the relationships between the lexicon, perceptual information, and language change (Ohala, 1993b;Ohala, 1993a;Hall, 2009;Hall et al, submitted;Kang and Cohen, 2016), some have found that incorporating perceptual data into accounts of functional load can succeed where traditional measures cannot (Tsui, 2012). In this paper, we have incorporated key insights from speech perception with ideal observer models of word recognition to form a revised definition of functional load.…”