Words and Messages

Longer words carry more information, according to research by cognitive scientists. It might sound obvious, until you start to think about it. Why, then, the difference between short 'now' and long 'immediately'?

For many years, linguists have believed that the length of a word was associated with how often it was used, and that short words are used more frequently than long ones. It was believed that the relationship between word length and frequency of use was based on an impulse to minimize the time and effort needed for speaking and writing.

But Steven Piantadosi and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that, to give information, it is more efficient to shorten the least informative words, not the most frequent ones. After analyzing word use in eleven different European languages, they found that word length was related with their information content, not with how often they are used.

Measuring the information of a word isn't easy, especially because it can vary depending on the context. The MIT group invented a method for estimating the information content of words in digitized texts by looking at how it is correlated with the preceding words.

But, why do scientists study this? Well, some linguists think language was not born to communicate; in fact, language is about establishing social relations. This study by the MIT is a ferocious counterattack by those who think languages are adapted to deliver information efficiently.

Extracted from an article by Philip Ball in Nature News. Picture by iStockphoto.com/Pgiam.