Work

Reply to Reilly and Kean: Clarifications on word length and information content

Year: 2011

Type: letter

Abstract: First, we disagree with Reilly and Kean ( 1) that our results on word length ( 2) contradicted Zipf's principle of least effort. Our findings were in the same spirit, except that we measured effort in a more principled way than Zipf could have ( 2). Assigning word length by information content is least effort under an assumption of a superlinear relationship between effort and information content ( 3), and it is optimal under a desire to stay just under the channel capacity of linguistic systems ( 4).

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1103550108

Authors: Steven T. Piantadosi, Harry Tily, Edward Gibson

Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Language: English

Topic: Language and cultural evolution

Subfield: Cultural Studies

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W2024828267

Cites: 5

Cited by: 7

Related to: 10