How cognitive selection affects language change.

Autor:	Li Y; Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.; Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin 14195, Germany., Breithaupt F; Department of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 001809.; Program of Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 001809., Hills T; Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom., Lin Z; Center for Life Span Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin 14195, Germany., Chen Y; Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.; Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China., Siew CSQ; Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119077, Singapore., Hertwig R; Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin 14195, Germany.
Jazyk:	angličtina
Zdroj:	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America [Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A] 2024 Jan 02; Vol. 121 (1), pp. e2220898120. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Dec 27.
DOI:	10.1073/pnas.2220898120
Abstrakt:	Like biological species, words in language must compete to survive. Previously, it has been shown that language changes in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how the survival of existing word forms can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties that impact language production. In the first study, we analyzed the survival of words in the context of interpersonal communication. We analyzed data from a large-scale serial-reproduction experiment in which stories were passed down along a transmission chain over multiple participants. The results show that words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, more arousing, and more emotional are more likely to survive retellings. We reason that the same trend might scale up to language evolution over multiple generations of natural language users. If that is the case, the same set of psycholinguistic properties should also account for the change of word frequency in natural language corpora over historical time. That is what we found in two large historical-language corpora (Study 2): Early acquisition, concreteness, and high arousal all predict increasing word frequency over the past 200 y. However, the two studies diverge with respect to the impact of word valence and word length, which we take up in the discussion. By bridging micro-level behavioral preferences and macro-level language patterns, our investigation sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying word competition. Competing Interests: Competing interests statement:The authors declare no competing interest.
Databáze:	MEDLINE
Externí odkaz:	Zobrazit plný text záznamu