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Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized for efficient communication
[article]
2017
arXiv
pre-print
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one aspect of a much more general property of words: how distinctive they are with respect to other words in a language. Distinctiveness plays a critical role in recognizing words in fluent speech, in that it reflects the strength of potential competitors when
arXiv:1703.01694v2
fatcat:77p3hjg5r5barpwjfko4dhysfq