Words learnt early in life, words that are arousing, evocative endure test of time: Study

NEW DELHI: Why people remember some words and use them all through their lives while some other words slip out of their vocabulary?

A study has found that words learnt early in life and words that are ‘arousing’ and evocative are among those that endure in a ‘survival of the fittest’ way.

It also found that words associated with what people can see or imagine, which has been described as ‘concrete’ words, are also more likely to endure the natural selection process.

For example, ‘cat’ is said to be more concrete than ‘animal’, which was more concrete than ‘organism’. ‘Sex’ and ‘fight’ were some of the examples the researchers cited of words that tend to be more arousing and evocative.

The study at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom delved into the aspect of why some words survive in the modern linguistic landscape, while others don’t.

“Our study finds that properties like early acquisition, concreteness, and arousal give linguistic information a selective advantage,” said Thomas Hills, a professor of Psychology and lead researcher of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers said that the findings help shed light on how the human brain processes and filters information, a process known as ‘cognitive selection’.

“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, capable of exerting lasting impacts on language evolution,” said Hills.

This becomes crucial in today’s world, where various information forms continually competitive for our attention, the researchers said.

“This cognitive selection influences what, in an information marketplace, will endure,” said Hills.

The first part of the study involved a story-retelling experiment where more than 12,000 people were asked to retell or reproduce a collection of thousands of short stories, each on an average 200 words long, the researchers described.

They, thus, analysed the survival of words in the context of interpersonal communication.

For the second part of the study, the psychologists quantitatively analysed millions of words from fiction and non-fiction books, newspapers, and magazines, over hundreds of years, from 1800 up to 2000.

Early acquisition, concreteness and high arousal predict increasing word frequency over the past 200 years, they found.

However, they said that the two studies diverged with respect to the impact of word valence and word length.

Overall, the results suggest that micro-level patterns of language production may scale up to macro-level patterns of language change over generations of language speakers, the researchers said in their study.