My doctoral dissertation is focused on understanding how common statistical patterns found throughout world languages provide insight into the optimization of human language. In more technical terms, I am examining how power law, scale free distributions in letter frequencies in words affect peoples’ ability to process them. By studying the effects of how, when, and where power law, scale free distributions occur in words, I am exploring what it means for the word forms of a language to be “optimized”.

      Power law distributions are relatively common in complex systems with a few examples being the connectivity of the internet, the distribution of wealth, and the sizes of cities across the world. One possible explanation for the prevalence of power law, scale free distributions is that they allow for optimized transfer of information and commodities across the system in question. I am applying this notion to the human language system with the logic being that evolutionary processes selected for optimized communication (in terms of effort to produce and comprehend language) and that word forms of modern day languages reflect this optimized process. My dissertation work is a combination of computational analyses of world languages as well as empirical studies with human participants to test what optimization means for word forms.