@inproceedings{brochhagen-boleda-2022-interaction-cognitive,
    title = "The interaction between cognitive ease and informativeness shapes the lexicons of natural languages",
    author = "Brochhagen, Thomas  and
      Boleda, Gemma",
    editor = "Serikov, Oleg  and
      Voloshina, Ekaterina  and
      Postnikova, Anna  and
      Klyachko, Elena  and
      Neminova, Ekaterina  and
      Vylomova, Ekaterina  and
      Shavrina, Tatiana  and
      Ferrand, Eric Le  and
      Malykh, Valentin  and
      Tyers, Francis  and
      Arkhangelskiy, Timofey  and
      Mikhailov, Vladislav  and
      Fenogenova, Alena",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP applications to field linguistics",
    month = oct,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Gyeongju, Republic of Korea",
    publisher = "International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.fieldmatters-1.5/",
    pages = "42--44",
    abstract = "It is common for languages to express multiple meanings with the same word, a phenomenon known as colexification. For instance, the meanings FINGER and TOE colexify in the word ``dedo'' in Spanish, while they do not colexify in English. Colexification has been suggested to follow universal constraints. In particular, previous work has shown that related meanings are more prone to colexify. This tendency has been explained in terms of the cognitive pressure for ease, since expressing related meanings with the same word makes lexicons easier to learn and use. The present study examines the interplay between this pressure and a competing universal constraint, the functional pressure for languages to maximize informativeness. We hypothesize that meanings are more likely to colexify if they are related (fostering ease), but not so related as to become confusable and cause misunderstandings (fostering informativeness). We find support for this principle in data from over 1200 languages and 1400 meanings. Our results thus suggest that universal principles shape the lexicons of natural languages. More broadly, they contribute to the growing body of evidence suggesting that languages evolve to strike a balance between competing functional and cognitive pressures."
}