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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 7, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

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How cognitive selection affects language change.

Ying Li^1,2, Fritz Breithaupt^3,4, Thomas Hills⁵

¹Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

|December 27, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

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.

Keywords:

age of acquisition corpus analysis language evolution psycholinguistics serial reproduction

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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.