The Communicative Lexicon Hypothesis – Piantadosi, Tily & Gibson (2009)
Presents two experiments to support the Communicative Lexicon Hypothesis which states that human lexical systems are efficient solutions to the problem of communication for the human language processor. Shows that information or predictability in context based on trigrams is a better predictor of word length than raw collection frequency. Informativity discriminates between all word lengths while frequency just distinguishes between one syllable words and all the rest. The second experiment tries to show that lexical stress is placed on more informative syllables across a number of languages. Shows a significant difference between the residual entropy in stressed syllables and unstressed syllables. The measure of residual entropy is problematic because it does not take into account the position of the syllable in the word, the influence of other syllables on the given syllables entropy, or the informatively of the words in context.