Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized for efficient\n communication

Abstract

The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of\nits use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that\nholds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one\naspect of a much more general property of words: how distinctive they are with\nrespect to other words in a language. Distinctiveness plays a critical role in\nrecognizing words in fluent speech, in that it reflects the strength of\npotential competitors when selecting the best candidate for an ambiguous\nsignal. Phonological information content, a measure of a word's string\nprobability under a statistical model of a language's sound or character\nsequences, concisely captures distinctiveness. Examining large-scale corpora\nfrom 13 languages, we find that distinctiveness significantly outperforms word\nlength as a predictor of frequency. This finding provides evidence that\nlisteners' processing constraints shape fine-grained aspects of word forms\nacross languages.\n