How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

Published on April 19, 2019

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.

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