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Thomas Hills (Department of Psychology)

Information Markets and the Evolution of Modern English

Recent laboratory and computational accounts of language suggest that languages evolve over time to become more learnable. Selective forces driving this evolution should be amplified by what some have referred to as the rise in attentional economics--more communicators competing for fewer receivers. Language concreteness, the capacity to visualize a concept, is a well-studied psycholinguistic variable known to facilitate speed of processing, comprehension, and memory--all features associated with improved learnability and likely to facilitate the cognitive survival (in memory) and reproduction (use) of words. I will discuss some recent evidence demonstrating a systematic rise in concrete language over the last 200 years. This was produced by combining multi-million word corpora (including the Google Ngram corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, and presidential speeches over the last 200 hundred years) with a recent collection of concreteness norms for over 40,000 English words. Concreteness rises both within and across word classes (e.g., nouns, verbs, and prepositions), indicating that the rise in concreteness is systemic and not limited to changes in grammar. Further, by comparing new norms with older norms, we can show that these changes in concreteness are not due to a bleaching effect caused by the loss of concreteness as words age. I hope at DR@W to foster a discussion on alternative explanations for this rise and the kinds of evidence that might support them.

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