🎆New paper out! 🎆
Me & @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social revisit the law of abbreviation, a nearly universal correlation between word frequency and brevity.
Paper: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/sjtkq
A 🧵:
Me & @alexeykoshevoy.bsky.social revisit the law of abbreviation, a nearly universal correlation between word frequency and brevity.
Paper: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/sjtkq
A 🧵:
Comments
❌ It doesn’t account for long and rare words.
❌ It can’t explain why the law of abbreviation is weakened by the presence of many short and rare words.
We propose an alternative explanation, based on a simple cultural evolutionary model, which does not require any pressure for efficiency.
Instead, we show the law arises from a general pressure for brevity—applying to all words, no matter their frequency.
Efficiency isn’t necessary or sufficient to explain the law of abbreviation. Instead, a general brevity bias is sufficient to account for it.
Paper: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/sjtkq
Code: https://github.com/alexeykosh/2023-dripf-model
Bonus: An AI-generated podcast: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/36898fde-4b52-4ba5-8d40-49347907c7ad/audio
(almost flawless except for the last 2 minutes)