Quantifying Cognitive Factors in Lexical Decline

TL;DR

This paper investigates how cognitive factors like semantics, phonology, and distribution influence lexical decline across English, French, and German, revealing that certain psycholinguistic factors significantly predict which words decrease in frequency over time.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive set of psycholinguistic factors and demonstrates their predictive power for lexical decline using historical data across multiple languages.

Findings

Semantic and distributional factors are significant predictors of lexical decline.

Declining words show reduced lexical context diversity over time.

Most proposed factors differ significantly between declining and stable words.

Abstract

We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic factors -- semantic, distributional, and phonological -- that we hypothesize are predictive of lexical decline, in which words greatly decrease in frequency over time. Using historical data across three languages (English, French, and German), we find that most of our proposed factors show a significant difference in the expected direction between each curated set of declining words and their matched stable words. Moreover, logistic regression analyses show that semantic and distributional factors are significant in predicting declining words. Further diachronic analysis reveals that declining words tend to decrease in the diversity of their lexical contexts over time, gradually narrowing their 'ecological niches'.