Exploring the dynamics of Shannon’s information and iconicity in language processing and lexeme evolution

Abstract

This two-part meta-study explores the relationship of Shannon’s information and iconicity in American English, with a focus on their implications for cognitive processing and the evolution of lexemes. Part one explores the expression of information in iconic words by calculating phonemic bigram surprisal using a very large corpus of spoken American English and cross referencing it with iconicity ratings. Iconic words—those with a form/meaning resemblance—are known to be processed with a cognitive advantage, so they are included in our tests as a benchmark. Within the framework of the Iconic Treadmill Hypothesis, we posit that as iconic words evolve towards arbitrariness, bigram sequences bec..