Greater Early Disambiguating Information for Less-Probable Words: The Lexicon Is Shaped by Incremental Processing

There has been much work over the last century on optimization of the lexicon for efficient communication, with a particular focus on the form of words as an evolving balance between production ease and communicative accuracy. Zipf’s law of abbreviation, the cross-linguistic trend for less-probable words to be longer, represents some of the strongest evidence the lexicon is shaped by a pressure for communicative efficiency. However, the various sounds that make up words do not all contribute the same amount of disambiguating information to a listener. Rather, the information a sound contributes depends in part on what specific lexical competitors exist in the lexicon. In addition, because the speech stream is perceived incrementally, early sounds in a word contribute on average more information than later sounds. Using a dataset of diverse languages, we demonstrate that, above and beyond containing more sounds, less-probable words contain sounds that convey more disambiguating information overall. We show further that this pattern tends to be strongest at word-beginnings, where sounds can contribute the most information.