Functionalist typologists have long argued that pressures associated with language usage
influence the distribution of grammatical properties across the world's languages …

We demonstrate a substantial improvement on one of the most celebrated empirical laws in
the study of language, Zipf's 75-y-old theory that word length is primarily determined by …

A principle of efficient language production based on information theoretic considerations is
proposed: Uniform Information Density predicts that language production is affected by a …

This article is a crosslinguistic investigation of the hypothesis that the average information
rate conveyed during speech communication results from a trade-off between average …

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 …

Evidence suggests that speakers hyperarticulate phonetic cues to word identity in a way that
increases phonetic distance to similar competitors. However, the degree and type of …

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 …

A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of
language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition …

Zipf (1935) posited that wordforms are optimized to minimize utterances' communicative
costs. Under the assumption that cost is given by an utterance's length, he supported this …

Recent work shows that word segmentation is influenced by distal prosodic characteristics of
the input several syllables from the segmentation point (Dilley & McAuley, 2008). Here …