Certain words like “sex” or “fight” are more likely to survive in a language, while others are lost over time through a process of natural selection.
New research from the University of Warwick shows that words like “sex” persist in language based on “survival of the fittest,” akin to natural selection. Recently, “rizz” (short for “charisma”) or “situationship” (a romantic relationship without a concrete definition) were declared words of the year in English, but it is not yet known whether these words will continue to be used in a few years. Professor Thomas Hills' research examines why some words survive in our modern linguistic landscape but others do not.
The study concludes that the words with the most staying power are those acquired early in life, words that are associated with things people can see or imagine, so-called “concrete” words (for example, For example, “cat” is more specific than “animal”). , which is more concrete than “organism”) and words that are more suggestive, including words like “sex” and “fight.”
The scientists suspect that these findings shed light on how the human brain processes and filters information, a process known as “cognitive selection.” This becomes crucial in today's world where different forms of information are constantly competing for our attention.
Thomas Hills, Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick and author of the study, comments: “Information is a complex organism that is constantly evolving as it undergoes cognitive selection in our minds. Languages change due to social, cultural and cognitive influences. Information environments evolve due to war, disease, population changes, and technological innovations. However, the mind remains relatively stable and can have a lasting influence on the development of language. This cognitive selection influences what will endure in an information market. “Our study finds that characteristics such as early acquisition, concreteness and stimulation confer a selective advantage to linguistic information.”
The first study involved a storytelling experiment in which more than 12,000 people were asked to tell a collection of thousands of short stories, each with an average length of 200 words. For the second part of the study, psychologists analyzed millions of language words from fiction and non-fiction books, newspapers and magazines over hundreds of years, from 1800 to 2000.
REFERENCE
How cognitive selection influences language change, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).