Abstract Language is a defining characteristic of our species, but the function, or functions,
that it serves has been debated for centuries. Here we bring recent evidence from …

Cognitive science applies diverse tools and perspectives to study human language.
Recently, an exciting body of work has examined linguistic phenomena through the lens of …

Abstract The linguist George Kingsley Zipf made a now classic observation about the
relationship between a word's length and its frequency; the more frequent a word is, the …

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) that use subword tokenization schemes can succeed
at a variety of language tasks that require character-level information, despite lacking explicit …

Zipf famously stated that, if natural language lexicons are structured for efficient
communication, the words that are used the most frequently should require the least effort …

Human languages evolve to make communication more efficient. But efficiency creates trade-
offs: what is efficient for speakers is not always efficient for comprehenders. How do …

Using computational simulations, this work demonstrates that it is possible to learn a
systematic relation between words' sound and their meanings. The sound–meaning relation …

Human languages are replete with ambiguity. This is most evident in homophony––where
two or more words sound the same, but carry distinct meanings. For example, the wordform …

Even though ambiguous words are common in languages, children find it hard to learn
homophones, where a single label applies to several distinct meanings (eg, Mazzocco …

We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity—bits per phoneme—
that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented …