Title: Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized for efficient communication,
Abstract: The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of
its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that
holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one
aspect of a much more general property of words: how distinctive they are with
respect to other words in a language. Distinctiveness plays a critical role in
recognizing words in fluent speech, in that it reflects the strength of
potential competitors when selecting the best candidate for an ambiguous
signal. Phonological information content, a measure of a word's string
probability under a statistical model of a language's sound or character
sequences, concisely captures distinctiveness. Examining large-scale corpora
from 13 languages, we find that distinctiveness significantly outperforms word
length as a predictor of frequency. This finding provides evidence that
listeners' processing constraints shape fine-grained aspects of word forms
across languages.