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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

We review recent research on the burgeoning topic of how language structure is shaped by principles of efficiency for communication and learning. Work in this area has infused long-standing ideas in linguistics and psychology with new precision and methodological rigor by bringing together information theory, newly available datasets, controlled experimentation, and computational modeling. We review a number of studies that focus on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntactic processes, and which deploy formal tools from information theory and probability theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does. These studies show how a pervasive pressure for efficient usage guides the form of natural language and suggest a rich future for language research in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication. Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we review studies that deploy formal tools from probability and information theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does, focusing on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntax. These studies show how a pervasive pressure for efficiency guides the forms of natural language and indicate that a rich future for language research lies in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication and inference. Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language. Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of efficiency in usage: what otherwise puzzling features of language find explanation in formal accounts of how language might be optimized for communication and learning? Here, we review studies that deploy formal tools from probability and information theory to understand how and why language works the way that it does, focusing on phenomena ranging from the lexicon through syntax. These studies show how a pervasive pressure for efficiency guides the forms of natural language and indicate that a rich future for language research lies in connecting linguistics to cognitive psychology and mathematical theories of communication and inference. a central property of natural language that was emphasized in early European linguistics, especially by Ferdinand de Saussure. the task of choosing a code to enable communication in the presence of noise, according to the characteristics of the channel. a color space defined by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in 1976. the communicativity color score of a color c, is a score reflecting how easy it is to communicate c given a distribution of words w for c in the language. two words combine/compose together to make a larger phrase, with a meaning that is composed of the meanings of the parts. most dependency links in human languages do not cross other dependency links in the same sentence. two words are in a dependency relation if they combine together in a phrase to make a larger meaning, such as ‘the’ and ‘dog’, or ‘dog’ and ‘sleeps’, in the sentence ‘the dog sleeps’. the length in words between two words that are dependent on one another for meaning. words in sentences of all human languages tend to be closer together than any reasonable baseline. a code is efficient if successful communication can be achieved with minimal effort on average by the sender and receiver, usually by minimizing the message length. a set of correlated word order patterns across languages. For example, languages with prepositions will tend to have verbs before their objects; languages with postpositions will tend to have verbs following their objects [3Greenberg J.H. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements.Universals Lang. 1963; 2: 73-113Google Scholar]. an iconic sign is one where its form somehow resembles its meaning. the mathematical theory linking the notions of probability, information, and efficient communication. the hypothesis that all words with high mutual information should be close, for processing efficiency [107Smith N.J. Levy R. The effect of word predictability on reading time is logarithmic.Cognition. 2013; 128: 302-319Crossref PubMed Scopus (0) Google Scholar]. the overall usefulness of a language, including both communicative efficiency and complexity as factors. two words that differ on only one sound/phoneme, such as ‘dog’ versus ‘log’ and ‘dog’ versus ‘dot’. a state of allocation of resources from which it is impossible to reallocate so as to make any one individual or preference criterion better off without making at least one individual or preference criterion worse off. the set of all Pareto efficient allocations. the task of choosing a code that makes signals short on average, according to the distribution over messages coming out of the information source. the negative log probability of a discrete event. the total information of a set of color terms the weighted average of the communicativity of each color in the space. the hypothesis that the information content of an utterance per unit time should be roughly constant [69Fenk A. Fenk G. Konstanz im Kurzzeitgedächtnis–Konstanz im sprachlichen Informationsfluß.Z. Exp. Angew. Psychologie. 1980; 27: 400-414PubMed Google Scholar, 70Genzel D. Charniak E. Entropy rate constancy in text.in: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics2002: 199-206Google Scholar, 71Levy R. Jaeger T.F. Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction.Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. 2007; : 849-856Google Scholar] the name given to the Chomksyan hypothesis that certain aspects of language are innate to humans [130Smith K. et al.Language learning, language use and the evolution of linguistic variation.Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. 2017; 372: 20160051Crossref PubMed Scopus (12) Google Scholar]. There is no consensus on the details of what these aspects might be. a set of color labels from languages from 110 non-industrialized cultures around the world [60Kay P. et al.The World Color Survey. CSLI Publications, 2009Google Scholar, 61Kay P. Maffi L. Color appearance and the emergence and evolution of basic color lexicons.Am. Anthropologist. 1999; 101: 743-760Crossref Google Scholar]. It includes labels from 20–30 participants for each of 330 colors. How Efficiency Shapes Human LanguageGibson et al.Trends in Cognitive SciencesOctober 14, 2019In BriefDOI of original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.02.003 Full-Text PDF

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language