Week 9 reading

Least effort and Zipf's Law of Abbreviation

The plan for week 9

For our final reading we are looking at Kanwal et al. (2017), which reports a single 4-condition experiment testing whether the Law of Abbreviation (frequent words have short labels, infrequent words have long labels) arises from a trade-off between accuracy and effort in communication, i.e. because people want to be understood but nonetheless minimise their effort.

As usual, in this week’s practical you’ll get a chance to look at a similar experiment in jsPsych, which will involve code from our week 4 word learning experiment again but also the infrastructure to run dyadic interaction experiments between web browsers.

Reading tasks for this week

Read:

Re-use

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