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Published on: April 19, 2017
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How cognitive selection affects language change
Ying Li1,2, Fritz Breithaupt3,4, Thomas Hills5
1Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
Summary
Language evolution favors words that are learned early, are concrete, and evoke emotion. These psycholinguistic properties predict word survival in communication and historical frequency changes.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Language Evolution
Background:
- Language change is influenced by cognitive constraints, leading to increased learnability over time.
- Word survival in language mirrors biological species competition.
- Psycholinguistic properties impacting language production may predict word form survival.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how psycholinguistic properties predict word form survival.
- To examine the role of interpersonal communication and historical language corpora in word competition.
- To bridge micro-level behavioral preferences with macro-level language patterns.
Main Methods:
- Serial-reproduction experiment analyzing word survival in story retellings.
- Analysis of two large historical-language corpora to track word frequency changes over 200 years.
Main Results:
- Words acquired earlier in life, more concrete, arousing, and emotional are more likely to survive retellings.
- Early acquisition, concreteness, and high arousal predict increasing word frequency in historical corpora.
- Divergence observed in the impact of word valence and length between the two studies.
Conclusions:
- Psycholinguistic properties significantly influence word survival and frequency changes in language.
- Cognitive mechanisms underlying word competition can be elucidated by examining both behavioral preferences and language patterns.
- The study provides insights into the drivers of language evolution and learnability.
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