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Why do human languages have homophones?

Sean Trott1, Benjamin Bergen1

  • 1Department of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093, United States of America.

Cognition
|September 18, 2020
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Homophony, words sounding alike but with different meanings, is not a direct design feature of human language. Instead, it emerges naturally and may even be selected against to improve clarity.

Keywords:
AmbiguityEfficiencyHomophonesLanguage evolutionPhonotactics

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Evolutionary Linguistics

Background:

  • Human languages exhibit ambiguity, notably homophony, where words share the same sound but have distinct meanings.
  • The function of homophony is debated: some theories propose it's a feature enabling efficient wordform reuse, while others suggest it's an emergent property.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether homophony is a selected-for feature in human languages or an emergent property.
  • To compare the incidence and concentration of homophony in real languages versus artificial lexica designed to control for linguistic properties.

Main Methods:

  • Constructed five artificial lexica matching phonotactics and word length distributions of real languages (English, German, Dutch, French, Japanese).
  • Quantified and compared the quantity and concentration of homophony in both real and artificial lexica.

Main Results:

  • Artificial lexica showed higher upper bounds on homophony than real languages.
  • Homophony was more prevalent among short, phonotactically plausible wordforms in artificial lexica compared to real ones.
  • Real lexica demonstrated 'smoothing' of homophones, resulting in more minimal pairs.

Conclusions:

  • Homophony appears to be an emergent property of language structure, not a directly selected-for feature.
  • Real languages may actively select against high concentrations of homophony to enhance communicative efficiency.
  • Lexical organization in real languages likely minimizes ambiguity through mechanisms like promoting minimal pairs.