How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

[1]  R. Paget The Origin of Speech , 1927, Nature.

[2]  Claude E. Shannon,et al.  A mathematical theory of communication , 1948, MOCO.

[3]  George Kingsley Zipf,et al.  Human behavior and the principle of least effort , 1949 .

[4]  Edward Sapir,et al.  Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech , 1955 .

[5]  Claude E. Shannon,et al.  Communication theory of secrecy systems , 1949, Bell Syst. Tech. J..

[6]  C. F. Hockett The origin of speech. , 1960, Scientific American.

[7]  Ray J. Solomonoff,et al.  A Formal Theory of Inductive Inference. Part I , 1964, Inf. Control..

[8]  E. Mark Gold,et al.  Language Identification in the Limit , 1967, Inf. Control..

[9]  A. Kimball Romney,et al.  SIBLING TERMINOLOGY AND CROSS-SEX BEHAVIOR. , 1967 .

[10]  D. Slobin Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar , 1973 .

[11]  W D Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Sentence Perception as an Interactive Parallel Process , 1975, Science.

[12]  P. Kay,et al.  The linguistic significance of the meanings of basic color terms , 1978 .

[13]  Leonard Talmy,et al.  How Language Structures Space , 1983 .

[14]  J. Nichols Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar , 1986 .

[15]  Ian H. Witten,et al.  Arithmetic coding for data compression , 1987, CACM.

[16]  Joan Bresnan,et al.  Locative inversion in Chichewa: a case study of factorization in grammar , 1989 .

[17]  Joseph H. Greenberg,et al.  Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements , 1990, On Language.

[18]  J. Rijkhoff,et al.  Explaining word order in the noun phrase , 1990 .

[19]  S. Pinker,et al.  Natural language and natural selection , 1990, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[20]  Matthew S. Dryer,et al.  SVO languages and the OV: VO typology , 1991, Journal of Linguistics.

[21]  Thomas Givon,et al.  Markedness in Grammar: Distributional, Communicative and Cognitive Correlates of Syntactic Structure , 1991 .

[22]  M. H. Kelly,et al.  Using sound to solve syntactic problems: the role of phonology in grammatical category assignments. , 1992, Psychological review.

[23]  M. Dryer The Greenbergian word order correlations , 1992 .

[24]  M. Bowerman Learning how to structure space for language: A crosslinguistic perspective , 1996 .

[25]  R. D'Andrade,et al.  Color categories in thought and language: It's not really red, green, yellow, blue: an inquiry into perceptual color space , 1997 .

[26]  Paul M. B. Vitányi,et al.  An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications , 1993, Graduate Texts in Computer Science.

[27]  Paul Kiparsky,et al.  The Rise of Positional Licensing , 1997 .

[28]  E. Gibson Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies , 1998, Cognition.

[29]  P. O'Seaghdha,et al.  Phrasal Ordering Constraints in Sentence Production: Phrase Length and Verb Disposition in Heavy-NP Shift , 1998 .

[30]  J. Crutchfield,et al.  Computational Mechanics: Pattern and Prediction, Structure and Simplicity , 1999, ArXiv.

[31]  G. Zipf The Psycho-Biology Of Language: AN INTRODUCTION TO DYNAMIC PHILOLOGY , 1999 .

[32]  P. Kay,et al.  Color appearance and the emergence and evolution of basic color lexicons , 1999 .

[33]  J. Nuckolls THE CASE FOR SOUND SYMBOLISM , 1999 .

[34]  Fernando C Pereira Formal grammar and information theory: together again? , 2000, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

[35]  Naftali Tishby,et al.  Predictability, Complexity, and Learning , 2000, Neural Computation.

[36]  F. Chang,et al.  “Long before short” preference in the production of a head-final language , 2001, Cognition.

[37]  John Hale,et al.  A Probabilistic Earley Parser as a Psycholinguistic Model , 2001, NAACL.

[38]  MATTHEW S. DRYER,et al.  Case distinctions, rich verb agreement, and word order type (Comments on Hawkins’ paper) , 2002 .

[39]  R. Jackendoff Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution , 2002 .

[40]  Eugene Charniak,et al.  Entropy Rate Constancy in Text , 2002, ACL.

[41]  Thomas McFadden,et al.  On morphological case and word-order freedom , 2003 .

[42]  N. Chater,et al.  Simplicity: a unifying principle in cognitive science? , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[43]  Liam Paninski,et al.  Estimation of Entropy and Mutual Information , 2003, Neural Computation.

[44]  S. Levinson,et al.  'Natural Concepts' in the Spatial Topologial Domain--Adpositional Meanings in Crosslinguistic Perspective: An Exercise in Semantic Typology , 2003 .

[45]  D. Brainard 5 – Color Appearance and Color Difference Specification , 2003 .

[46]  B. Bergen The Psychological Reality of Phonaesthemes , 2004 .

[47]  R. F. Cancho Euclidean distance between syntactically linked words. , 2004 .

[48]  S. Levinson,et al.  Opinion TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.8 No.3 March 2004 Can language restructure cognition? The case for space , 2022 .

[49]  Ronald M. Kaplan,et al.  Lexical Functional Grammar A Formal System for Grammatical Representation , 2004 .

[50]  David I. Beaver,et al.  The puzzle of ambiguity , 2005 .

[51]  L. Steels,et al.  coordinating perceptually grounded categories through language: a case study for colour , 2005, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[52]  Edward Gibson,et al.  Consequences of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input for Sentenial Complexity , 2005, Cogn. Sci..

[53]  Angela M. Brown,et al.  Universality of color names , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[54]  Joan L. Bybee,et al.  From Usage to Grammar: The Mind's Response to Repetition , 2007 .

[55]  Noam Chomsky Approaching UG from Below , 2006 .

[56]  Roger Levy,et al.  Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction , 2006, NIPS.

[57]  R. Ferrer i Cancho Why do syntactic links not cross , 2006 .

[58]  Paul M. B. Vitányi,et al.  ‘Ideal learning’ of natural language: Positive results about learning from positive evidence , 2007 .

[59]  Thomas L. Griffiths,et al.  Language Evolution by Iterated Learning With Bayesian Agents , 2007, Cogn. Sci..

[60]  P. Kay,et al.  Color naming reflects optimal partitions of color space , 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[61]  Roger Levy,et al.  A noisy-channel model of rational human sentence comprehension under uncertain input , 2008, EMNLP 2008.

[62]  R. Levy Expectation-based syntactic comprehension , 2008, Cognition.

[63]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[64]  S. Kita,et al.  Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning , 2008, Cognition.

[65]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  From sound to syntax: phonological constraints on children's lexical categorization of new words* , 2008, Journal of Child Language.

[66]  Simon Kirby,et al.  Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[67]  Haitao Liu,et al.  Dependency Distance as a Metric of Language Comprehension Difficulty , 2008 .

[68]  Martin Haspelmath,et al.  Parametric versus functional explanations of syntactic universals , 2008 .

[69]  Roger Levy,et al.  Minimal-length linearizations for mildly context-sensitive dependency trees , 2009, NAACL.

[70]  K. Rayner,et al.  Eye movement evidence that readers maintain and act on uncertainty about past linguistic input , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[71]  Angela M. Brown,et al.  World Color Survey color naming reveals universal motifs and their within-language diversity , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[72]  W. Bruce Croft,et al.  Building social cognitive models of language change , 2009, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[73]  S. Levinson,et al.  The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. , 2009, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[74]  Karl J. Friston The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? , 2010, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[75]  Amy Perfors,et al.  Why are some word orders more common than others? A uniform information density account , 2010, NIPS.

[76]  Daniel Gildea,et al.  Do Grammars Minimize Dependency Length? , 2010, Cogn. Sci..

[77]  Vittorio Loreto,et al.  Modeling the emergence of universality in color naming patterns , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[78]  G. Lupyan,et al.  Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure , 2010, PloS one.

[79]  T Florian Jaeger,et al.  On language 'utility': processing complexity and communicative efficiency. , 2011, Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science.

[80]  Steven T Piantadosi,et al.  Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication , 2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[81]  Roger Levy,et al.  Integrating surprisal and uncertain-input models in online sentence comprehension: formal techniques and empirical results , 2011, ACL.

[82]  M. Gell-Mann,et al.  The origin and evolution of word order , 2011, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[83]  Richard L. Lewis,et al.  In search of on-line locality effects in sentence comprehension. , 2011, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[84]  Naftali Tishby,et al.  Trading Value and Information in MDPs , 2012 .

[85]  P. Smolensky,et al.  Learning biases predict a word order universal , 2012, Cognition.

[86]  Maryia Fedzechkina,et al.  Language learners restructure their input to facilitate efficient communication , 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[87]  Head‐marking and dependent‐marking , 2012 .

[88]  Steven T. Piantadosi,et al.  The communicative function of ambiguity in language , 2011, Cognition.

[89]  R. Berwick,et al.  A Bird’s Eye View of Human Language Evolution , 2012, Front. Evol. Neurosci..

[90]  Charles Kemp,et al.  Kinship Categories Across Languages Reflect General Communicative Principles , 2012, Science.

[91]  S. Piantadosi,et al.  Info/information theory: Speakers choose shorter words in predictive contexts , 2013, Cognition.

[92]  Marco Kuhlmann,et al.  Mildly Non-Projective Dependency Grammar , 2013, CL.

[93]  A.,et al.  The linguistics of " color " , 2013 .

[94]  Nathaniel J. Smith,et al.  The effect of word predictability on reading time is logarithmic , 2013, Cognition.

[95]  R. Saxe,et al.  A Noisy-Channel Account of Crosslinguistic Word-Order Variation , 2013, Psychological science.

[96]  Leon Bergen,et al.  Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation , 2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[97]  Elsi Kaiser,et al.  Information structure: linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches. , 2013, Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science.

[98]  S. Kita,et al.  The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution , 2014, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[99]  H. D. Swart,et al.  The semantic origins of word order , 2014, Cognition.

[100]  Catherine Laing A phonological analysis of onomatopoeia in early word production , 2014 .

[101]  Simon Kirby,et al.  How arbitrary is language? , 2014, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[102]  Thomas L Griffiths,et al.  Tracing the roots of syntax with Bayesian phylogenetics , 2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[103]  G. Lupyan,et al.  Iconicity in English and Spanish and Its Relation to Lexical Category and Age of Acquisition , 2015, PloS one.

[104]  Simon Kirby,et al.  Word Meanings Evolve to Selectively Preserve Distinctions on Salient Dimensions , 2015, Cogn. Sci..

[105]  Richard Futrell,et al.  Cross-linguistic gestures reflect typological universals: A subject-initial, verb-final bias in speakers of diverse languages , 2015, Cognition.

[106]  Terry Regier,et al.  Word Meanings across Languages Support Efficient Communication , 2015 .

[107]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Arbitrariness, Iconicity, and Systematicity in Language , 2015, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[108]  Jordi Grau-Moya,et al.  Bounded Rationality, Abstraction, and Hierarchical Decision-Making: An Information-Theoretic Optimality Principle , 2015, Front. Robot. AI.

[109]  Sean Roberts,et al.  Emergence of systematic iconicity: transmission, interaction and analogy , 2015, CogSci.

[110]  S. Kirby,et al.  Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure , 2015, Cognition.

[111]  Benoît Crabbé,et al.  Dependency length minimisation effects in short spans: a large-scale analysis of adjective placement in complex noun phrases , 2015, ACL.

[112]  The placement of the head that minimizes online memory: a complex systems approach , 2015 .

[113]  Richard Futrell,et al.  Quantifying Word Order Freedom in Dependency Corpora , 2015, DepLing.

[114]  Philippe Schlenker,et al.  Event representations constrain the structure of language: Sign language as a window into universally accessible linguistic biases , 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[115]  Richard Futrell,et al.  Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages , 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[116]  Delwin T. Lindsey,et al.  Hunter-Gatherer Color Naming Provides New Insight into the Evolution of Color Terms , 2015, Current Biology.

[117]  William Croft,et al.  Functional Approaches to Grammar , 2015 .

[118]  Michael White,et al.  Investigating locality effects and surprisal in written English syntactic choice phenomena , 2016, Cognition.

[119]  Benjamin Bergen,et al.  Finding Non-Arbitrary Form-Meaning Systematicity Using String-Metric Learning for Kernel Regression , 2016, ACL.

[120]  Christian Bentz,et al.  Learning pressures reduce morphological complexity: Linking corpus, computational and experimental evidence , 2016, CL4LC@COLING 2016.

[121]  Morten H. Christiansen,et al.  Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages , 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[122]  Carolin Müller-Spitzer,et al.  The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure – Large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort , 2016, PloS one.

[123]  Bevil R. Conway,et al.  Color naming across languages reflects color use , 2017, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[124]  Edward Gibson,et al.  Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages , 2016, Cogn. Sci..

[125]  Michael Cysouw,et al.  The Entropy of Words - Learnability and Expressivity across More than 1000 Languages , 2017, Entropy.

[126]  Anne Christophe,et al.  Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities , 2017, Cognition.

[127]  Noah D. Goodman,et al.  Subjectivity Predicts Adjective Ordering Preferences , 2017, Open Mind.

[128]  Haitao Liu,et al.  Dependency distance: A new perspective on syntactic patterns in natural languages. , 2017, Physics of life reviews.

[129]  Amy Perfors,et al.  Language learning, language use and the evolution of linguistic variation , 2017, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[130]  Roger Levy,et al.  Noisy-context surprisal as a human sentence processing cost model , 2017, EACL.

[131]  R. Dixon,et al.  The Cambridge handbook of linguistic typology , 2017 .

[132]  Robin Clark,et al.  Detecting evolutionary forces in language change , 2016, Nature.

[133]  Jamie Reilly,et al.  Non-Arbitrariness in Mapping Word Form to Meaning: Cross-Linguistic Formal Markers of Word Concreteness , 2017, Cogn. Sci..

[134]  Richard Futrell,et al.  A functional theory of gender paradigms , 2017 .

[135]  Charles Kemp,et al.  Color naming reflects both perceptual structure and communicative need , 2018, Top. Cogn. Sci..

[136]  Charles Kemp,et al.  Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution , 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[137]  A. Christophe,et al.  Learning homophones in context: Easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages , 2018, Cognitive Psychology.

[138]  Daniel Gildea,et al.  Minimizing Syntactic Dependency Lengths: Typological/Cognitive Universal? , 2018 .

[139]  P. Walker,et al.  The Changing Role of Sound‐Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies , 2017, Cognitive science.

[140]  Noah A. Smith,et al.  Discovering Phonesthemes with Sparse Regularization , 2018 .

[141]  Frank Seifart,et al.  Nouns slow down speech across structurally and culturally diverse languages , 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[142]  Richard Futrell,et al.  Alternative Solutions to a Language Design Problem: The Role of Adjectives and Gender Marking in Efficient Communication , 2018, Top. Cogn. Sci..

[143]  Daniel Jurafsky,et al.  An Information-Theoretic Explanation of Adjective Ordering Preferences , 2018, CogSci.

[144]  A. Majid,et al.  Hunter-Gatherer Olfaction Is Special , 2018, Current Biology.

[145]  Seán G. Roberts,et al.  Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages , 2018, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[146]  Maryia Fedzechkina,et al.  Human Information Processing Shapes Language Change , 2018, Psychological science.

[147]  Yang Xu,et al.  Semantic Typology and Efficient Communication , 2018 .