Abstract

First, we disagree with Reilly and Kean (1) that our results on word length (2) contradicted Zipf's principle of least effort. Our findings were in the same spirit, except that we measured effort in a more principled way than Zipf could have (2). Assigning word length by information content is least effort under an assumption of a superlinear relationship between effort and information content (3), and it is optimal under a desire to stay just under the channel capacity of linguistic systems (4).

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