ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Factors Influencing the Emergence of Dependency Length Minimization in Neural Agent Simulations.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Word reuse and combination support efficient communication of emerging concepts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Review
- Informativeness across Interpreting Types: Implications for Language Shifts under Cognitive Load.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Schrödinger's tree-On syntax and neural language models.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2022Review
- A Reappraisal of Dependency Length Minimization as a Linguistic Universal.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2022Article
- The forms and meanings of grammatical markers support efficient communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Quantifiers in Natural Language: Efficient Communication and Degrees of Semantic Universals.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- An Information-Theoretic Account of Semantic Interference in Word Production.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Lack of selectivity for syntax relative to word meanings throughout the language network.Cognition · 2020Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
The universal properties of human languages have been the subject of intense study across the language sciences. We report computational and corpus evidence for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties-those related to word order-result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with the need to reduce ambiguity. We formalize these two pressures with information-theoretic and neural-network models of complexity and ambiguity and simulate grammars with optimized word-order parameters on large-scale data from 51 languages. Evolution of grammars toward efficiency results in word-order patterns that predict a large subset of the major word-order correlations across languages.
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