RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Drift as a driver of language change: An artificial language experiment
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.03.26.437270
DO 10.1101/2021.03.26.437270
A1 Rafael Ventura
A1 Joshua B. Plotkin
A1 Gareth Roberts
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/03/26/2021.03.26.437270.abstract
AB Over half a century ago, George Zipf observed that less frequent words tend to have entered the language more recently. Since then, corpus studies have accumulated evidence that rare words have higher rates of replacement and regularisation. Two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain this pattern: (a) less frequent words change more because deterministic selection against innovation is weaker for such words, and (b) less frequent words change more because stochastic drift is stronger in smaller populations. Here, we report an experimental test of these hypotheses. Participants were tasked with learning a miniature language consisting of two nouns and two plural markers. Nouns occurred at different frequencies and were subjected to treatments that varied drift and selection. Using a model that accounts for participant heterogeneity, we measured the rate of noun regularisation and the strength of selection and drift in participant responses. Our results indicate that the elevated rate of regularisation we observed in the low-frequency nouns was attributable to drift alone. These results add to a growing body of evidence that drift may be a major driver of language change.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.