Languages are efficient, but for whom?

Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication

(2020) Michael Hahn et al.   PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Neutral syndrome

(2020) Armand M. Leroi et al.   Nature Human Behaviour

Resource-rational analysis: understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources

(2019) Falk Lieder et al.   BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES

How Efficiency Shapes Human Language

(2019) Edward Gibson et al.   TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCES

Learning homophones in context: Easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages

(2018) Isabelle Dautriche et al.   COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution

(2018) Noga Zaslavsky et al.   PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A Mechanistic Framework for Explaining Audience Design in Language Production

(2018) Victor S. Ferreira   Annual Review of Psychology

Detecting evolutionary forces in language change

(2017) Mitchell G. Newberry et al.   NATURE

Color naming across languages reflects color use

(2017) Edward Gibson et al.   PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Languages Support Efficient Communication about the Environment: Words for Snow Revisited

(2016) Terry Regier et al.   PLoS One

What residualizing predictors in regression analyses does (and what it does not do)

(2014) Lee H. Wurm et al.   JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE

Functional Load and the Lexicon: Evidence that Syntactic Category and Frequency Relationships in Minimal Lemma Pairs Predict the Loss of Phoneme contrasts in Language Change

(2013) Andrew Wedel et al.   LANGUAGE AND SPEECH

Not all ambiguous words are created equal: An EEG investigation of homonymy and polysemy

(2012) Ekaterini Klepousniotou et al.   BRAIN AND LANGUAGE

Kinship Categories Across Languages Reflect General Communicative Principles

(2012) C. Kemp et al.   SCIENCE

Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication

(2011) Steven T. Piantadosi et al.   PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese Word and Character Frequencies Based on Film Subtitles

(2010) Qing Cai et al.   PLoS One