Zipf's Law: Balancing Signal Usage Cost and Communication Efficiency.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26427059.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0139475 and PMC identifier 4591018.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
We propose a model that explains the reliable emergence of power laws (e.g., Zipf's law) during the development of different human languages. The model incorporates the principle of least effort in communications, minimizing a combination of the information-theoretic communication inefficiency and direct signal cost. We prove a general relationship, for all optimal languages, between the signal cost distribution and the resulting distribution of signals. Zipf's law then emerges for logarithmic signal cost distributions, which is the cost distribution expected for words constructed from letters or phonemes.
Medical subject headings
- Communication
- Language
- Models, Theoretical