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Miller's Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language

2020-09-09

Abstract excerpt

<p>Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf provided a famous argument in the affirmative: shorter words, which are easier to use, tend to be more frequent, apparently due to the pressure to minimize speaker effort. However, G. A. Miller showed that even a monkey randomly typing at a keyboard, and intermittently striking the space bar, would generate "words" with similar statist...

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Literature Corpus work
fae310a7-0385-52f1-8fb6-c10064e3fc53
DOI
10.31234/osf.io/3fswz
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Miller's Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural LanguageDOI 10.31234/osf.io/3fswz
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