中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

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. Significance Words compete for survival in each language. This research investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying the rise and fall of English word forms using two complementary research paradigms: a serial reproduction experiment where a story is passed on along a diffusion chain and a quantitative linguistic analysis of historical corpora that spans the past two centuries. We found that the competition among word forms is closely associated with how humans use language: words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, and more arousing are more likely to survive. Our results suggest that micro-level patterns of language production may scale up to macro-level patterns of language change over generations of language speakers.