Without being taught, children learning addition discover strategies that are faster and less error-prone than those in their repertoire. Leading explanations of strategy discovery propose metacognitive mechanisms where children iteratively rewrite …
Efficient communication accounts of cross-linguistic variation propose that languages trade-off informativeness and complexity based on communicative need, often measured by usage frequency and operationalized as a free parameter. We propose that …
Storytelling is an important avenue for social learning, proposed to have enabled humans to acquire, preserve, and transmit rich environmental knowledge over generations. Through stories, learners can be taught the causal structure of their …
When speakers refer to objects in the world, they often overinform: provide their listener with redundant adjectival information. Contrary to classical theories in linguistics, recent theories have framed overinformativeness as an efficient means of …
Despite being ubiquitous in natural language, collocations (e.g., kick+habit) incur a unique processing cost, compared to compositional phrases (kick+door) and idioms (kick+bucket). We confirm this cost with behavioural data as well as MINERVA2, a …
Recently the principles of efficient communication have provided useful characterizations of semantic typology: the diversity of attested languages can be described by competing pressures for simplicity and informativeness. While this approach has …
Whereas principles of communicative efficiency and legal doctrine dictate that laws be comprehensible to the common world, empirical evidence suggests legal documents are largely incomprehensible to lawyers and laypeople alike. Here, a corpus …
Collocations, semi-productive lexical combinations with one figurative and one literal word, are said to be a "pain in the neck" for researchers and L2 learners. The present study aims: (i) to conceptually replicate the processing costs incurred by …
Languages vary in the way they categorize semantic domains. Incidentally certain semantic systems appear more often than others across the world. Recent research has shown that the attested variability can be explained as the result of languages …
Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the US government to simplify public legal documents for the benefit of society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts--collectively …