Related Concept Videos
Components of Language
Language and Cognition
Language
Corballis and Suddendorf (2007) and Tomasello and Rakoczy (2003) highlight the role of language in...
Language Development
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language
Language formation and comprehension take place in the dominant hemisphere. The dominant hemisphere is responsible for understanding the meaning of spoken, written, or sign language, as well as the ability to communicate. For most people, the left hemisphere is the dominant one. The right hemisphere, then, gives tone and emotional context to the...
Improving Translational Accuracy
You might also read
Related Articles
Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.
Vocal-tract length estimation from vowel formants benchmarked against acoustic pharyngometry.
Life of p: A consonant older than speech.
Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration.
Semantic granularity in derivation.
Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift.
From sociolinguistic perception to strategic action in the study of social meaning.
Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations.
Re-taking the field: resuming in-person fieldwork amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Differential indexing in Kamang: a viewpoint alternation.
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 3, 2025

Experimental Paradigm for Measuring the Effect of Induced Emotion on Grammar Learning
Published on: January 29, 2020
Efficiency in human languages: Corpus evidence for universal principles.
Natalia Levshina1, Steven Moran2
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Human language demonstrates communicative efficiency, a universal tendency for speakers to save effort in processing and articulation. This efficiency is evident across various linguistic levels, from words to sounds, in multilingual corpora.
More Related Videos
06:48Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: June 25, 2019
09:09Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Growing interest in communicative efficiency in human language.
- Theories suggest language users strive for efficiency, minimizing processing and articulation effort.
- Recent corpus data has fueled studies on efficient language use across linguistic domains.
Purpose of the Study:
- To discuss communicative efficiency in human languages.
- To focus on evidence of efficient language use in multilingual corpora.
- To provide an overview of efficiency manifestations and discuss key questions and findings.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of multilingual corpora.
- Review of existing literature on efficient language use.
- Synthesis of findings across different levels of language structure.
Main Results:
- Evidence suggests communicative efficiency is a universal feature of human language.
- Efficiency is observed in lexicon, morphosyntax, discourse, and phonology.
- Multilingual corpora provide significant insights into efficient language use.
Conclusions:
- Communicative efficiency is a fundamental principle shaping human language structure and use.
- Further research is needed to explore the nuances of efficiency across diverse languages and contexts.
- This collection addresses novel questions and findings regarding language efficiency.