While it has long been understood that the human mind evolved to learn language, recent studies have begun to ask the inverted question: How has language evolved under the cognitive constraints of its users and become more learnable over time? In this paper, we explored how the semantic change of English words is shaped by the way humans acquire and process language o seu comentГЎrio estГЎ aqui. In Study 1, we quantified the extent of semantic change over the past 200 years and found that meaning change is more likely for words that are acquired later in life and are more difficult to process. We argue that it is human cognition that constrains the semantic evolution of words, rather than the other way around, because historical meanings of words were not easily accessible to people living today, and therefore could not have directly influenced how they learn and process language. In Study 2, we went further to show that semantic change, while bringing the benefit of meeting communicative needs, is cognitively costly for those who were born early enough to experience the change: Semantic change between 1970 and 2000 hindered processing speeds among middle-aged adults (ages 45–55) but not in younger adults (ages <25)>
Inclusion
Languages face the challenge of expressing an endless set of suggestions playing with a finite number of terminology (Chomsky, 1957). If you’re the easiest way to meet so it problem will be to do the brand new terminology to share with you novel definitions, a common strategy is in order to assign the latest meanings in order to established conditions (Ramiro mais aussi al., 2018). Previous literary works has revealed the meanings off words change in predictable suggests (Ullmann, 1962) and other membership of these regularities for the semantic transform was in fact advised, particularly grammaticalization, subjectification, erosion, and you will metaphorization (Lakoff, 2008; Tr). On the other hand, discover circumstances knowledge one recorded how if in case individual conditions altered their definition (elizabeth.g., Lehrer, 1985). Including, the first meaning of the word aired for the farming was to cast or sow seed commonly, however with the brand new introduction of telecommunications innovation (such as the radio), aired (due to the fact early 20th 100 years) is the spread or shipping regarding a contact.
What situations make some words changes the significance to an elevated extent than others? All of our method to so it concern follows a great Darwinian see one to considers language because an elaborate adaptive program one to evolves within the possibilities stress out-of individual cognitive limitations more than generations off language users (Beckner et al., 2009; Christiansen & Chater, 2008; Darwin, 1871). You to extremely important cognitive restriction that will possess designed vocabulary advancement try standard reading and you may running biases derived from cognitive constraints. One of several benefits associated with such as for example a view of language evolution would be the fact aside from detailing exactly how person vocabulary emerges, additionally, it provides a theoretic foundation to understand more about hypotheses from exactly how peoples dialects changes once the development, the range of your latest research.
Evidence supporting the relation anywhere between how code was received and you will processed and exactly how language advanced might have been racking up, of research-based experiments from artificial dialects (Kirby ainsi que al., 2008), computational simulations (Kirby, 2001; Monaghan ainsi que al., 2011; Steels, 2011), and has just, investigation of pure vocabulary corpora (Hills & Adelman, 2015; Monaghan, 2014). Additionally, it’s worthy of citing you to cognitive constraints do not have to get quite strong to help you contour language advancement. Actually weak personal-level biases for the language behaviors is scaled to people-peak linguistic phenomena through cultural transmission (e.grams., Scott-Phillips & Kirby, 2010) or public build (e.g., Linguistic specific niche theory; Lupyan & Dale, 2010).
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Although not, so far, extremely knowledge exhibiting the newest relatives of language development so you can language buy and you may running possess focused on progression of the lexical means (elizabeth.grams., Monaghan, 2014; Pagel et al., 2007). Smaller evidence is present based on how brand new advancement of semantics, and/or meanings regarding terminology, is comparable to code order and you will handling. Thank goodness, the availability of high-measure diachronic language corpora, and computational gadgets having quantifying diachronic change in term embeddings over time (elizabeth.g., Dubossarsky mais aussi al., 2016; Hamilton mais aussi al., 2016; Li mais aussi al., 2019) possess enabled me to address that this pit in the books.