Zipf's law revisited: Spoken dialog, linguistic units, parameters, and the principle of least effort.

ABSTRACT: The ubiquitous inverse relationship between word frequency and word rank is commonly known as Zipf's law. The theoretical underpinning of this law states that the inverse relationship yields decreased effort in both the speaker and hearer, the so-called principle of least effort. Most research has focused on showing an inverse relationship only for written monolog, only for frequencies and ranks of one linguistic unit, generally word unigrams, with strong correlations of the power law to the observed frequency distributions, with limited to no attention to psychological mechanisms such as the principle of least effort. The current paper extends the existing findings, by not focusing on written monolog but on a more fundamental form of communication, spoken dialog, by not only investigating

SUBMITTER: Linders GM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9971120 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature