The lexicon adapts to competing communicative pressures: Explaining patterns of word similarity

Cross-linguistically, lexicons tend to be more phonetically clustered than required by the phonotactics of the language; that is, words within a language are more similar to each other than they need to be. In this study, we investigate how this property evolves under the influence of competing comm...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition Vol. 267; p. 106372
Main Authors: Keogh, Aislinn, Culbertson, Jennifer, Kirby, Simon
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.02.2026
Subjects:
Artificial language learning
Communication
Computational modelling
Efficiency
Language evolution
Lexicon
Artificial language learning
Language evolution
Efficiency
Lexicon
Computational modelling
Communication
ISSN:0010-0277, 1873-7838, 1873-7838
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Cross-linguistically, lexicons tend to be more phonetically clustered than required by the phonotactics of the language; that is, words within a language are more similar to each other than they need to be. In this study, we investigate how this property evolves under the influence of competing communicative pressures: a production-side pressure to re-use more easily articulated sounds, and a comprehension-side pressure for distinctiveness of wordforms. In an exemplar-based computational model and a communication experiment using a miniature artificial language, we show that natural-language-like levels of clustering emerge from a trade-off between these pressures. With only one pressure at work, the resulting lexicons tend to inhabit an extreme region of the possible design space: production pressures alone give rise to maximally clustered lexicons, while comprehension pressures alone give rise to maximally disperse lexicons. We also test whether clustering emerges more strongly for high-frequency items, but our results lend support only to a weak relationship between frequency and clustering. Overall, this study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that mechanisms operating at the level of individual language users and individual episodes of communication can give rise to emergent structural properties of language.
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ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106372