title: Wordform Similarity Increases With Semantic Similarity: An Analysis of 100 Languages.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (ENS, CNRS, EHESS), Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University.|School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh.
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Dautriche
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT.
authors.forename: Kyle
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mahowald
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT.
authors.forename: Edward
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gibson
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester.
authors.forename: Steven T
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Piantadosi
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Arbitrariness of the sign; Lexical design; Lexicon; Phonology; Semantics