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In a recent article, Meylan and Griffiths (MeylanGriffiths, 2021, henceforth, MG) focus their attention on the significant methodological challenges that can arise when using large-scale linguistic corpora. To this end, MG revisit a well-known result of Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson (2011, henceforth, PTG) who argue that average information content is a better predictor of word length than word frequency. We applaud MG who conducted a very important study that should be read by any researcher interested in working with large-scale corpora. The fact that MG mostly failed to find clear evidence in favor of PTG's main finding motivated us to test PTG's idea on a subset of the largest archive of German language texts designed for linguistic research, the German Reference Corpus consisting of ∼43 billion words. We only find very little support for the primary data point reported by PTG. |
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