Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation holds for individual characters across a broad range of writing systems

Bibliographic Data

ID21307384
AuthorsAlexey Koshevoy (0000-0002-4466-0639, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, corresponding author), Helena Miton (0000-0003-0896-1167, Santa Fe Institute), Olivier Morin (0000-0002-6216-1307, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
Year2023
Volume238
Pages105527
Publication date2023-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCognition (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-0277 • E-ISSN: 1873-7838
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105527
PMID37364507
OpenAlexW4381988556
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited30

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation - the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are simpler than less frequent ones - has been shown to hold at the level of words in many languages. We tested whether it holds at the level of individual written characters. Character complexity is similar to word length in that it requires more cognitive and motor effort for producing and processing more complex symbols. We built a dataset of character complexity and frequency measures covering 27 different writing systems. According to our data, Zipf's Law of Abbreviation holds for every writing system in our dataset - the more frequent characters have lower degrees of complexity and vice-versa. This result provides further evidence of optimization mechanisms shaping communication systems

Character (mathematics) · Code (set theory) · Cognition · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Programming language · Range (aeronautics) · Statistics · Versa · Word (group theory) · Writing system · Zipf's law · Computer Science · Digital Communication and Language · Fractal and DNA sequence analysis · Language and cultural evolution · Mathematics · Psychology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access