On the Connection Between Language Change and Language Processing

Abstract

AbstractPrevious studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical‐distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction. Through a binomial linear regression analysis, we investigated the probability of lexical extinction by the first decade of the twenty‐first century (2000s) for words that existed in the first decade of the nineteenth‐century (1800s) in eight data sets for five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The binomial linear regression analysis revealed that words that are more similar in form to other words are less likely to disappear from a language. By contrast, words that are more similar in meaning to other words are more likely to become extinct. In addition, a more consistent mapping between form and meaning protects a word from lexical extinction. A nonlinear time‐to‐event analysis furthermore revealed that the position of a word in orthographic and semantic space continues to influence the probability of it disappearing from a language for at least 200 years. Effects of the lexical‐distributional properties of words under investigation here have been reported in the language processing literature as well. The results reported here, therefore, fit well with a usage‐based approach to language change, which holds that language change is at least to some extent connected to cognitive mechanisms in the human brain.