Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages

Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on words which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode meaning distinctions in th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dautriche, Isabelle (Author), Piantadosi, Steven T. (Author), Mahowald, Kyle Adam (Contributor), Gibson, Edward A (Contributor)
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Contributor), Gibson, Edward (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley Blackwell, 2018-01-08T19:26:23Z.
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Online Access:Get fulltext
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100 1 0 |a Dautriche, Isabelle  |e author 
100 1 0 |a Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Gibson, Edward  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Mahowald, Kyle Adam  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Gibson, Edward A  |e contributor 
700 1 0 |a Piantadosi, Steven T.  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Mahowald, Kyle Adam  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Gibson, Edward A  |e author 
245 0 0 |a Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages 
260 |b Wiley Blackwell,   |c 2018-01-08T19:26:23Z. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/113025 
520 |a Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on words which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode meaning distinctions in their sound properties, which may be important for language learning. Here, we investigate the relationship between semantic distance and phonological distance in the large-scale structure of the lexicon. We show evidence in 100 languages from a diverse array of language families that more semantically similar word pairs are also more phonologically similar. This suggests that there is an important statistical trend for lexicons to have semantically similar words be phonologically similar as well, possibly for functional reasons associated with language learning. 
520 |a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.) (Grant F32HD070544) 
546 |a en_US 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Cognitive Science