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This paper examines data from English, Swedish and German in order to find a theoretical distribution that describes the observed relation between word length and frequency. In Swedish and English, most word tokens consist of three letters only, while shorter or longer words occur less frequently. We found that the equation with the general form f exp = a * L b * c L (a variant of the so-called gamma distribution) approximates the observed frequencies reasonably well. This formula incorporates both the fact that the number of possible words increases with word length, and the fact that longer words tend to be avoided, presumably because they are uneconomic. To our knowledge this formula has not been proposed to describe word frequency data. We examined frequency distributions of word length in Swedish and English, and explored different variants of the equation by systematically varying the a, b and c parameters. Subsequently, we also applied the formula to the frequency distribution of sentence length in English, and found an almost perfect fit for a corpus consisting of different text genres. Moreover, the data showed that the formula can be used to distinguish between different kinds of text genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two miniature artificial language learning experiments, we compare the processing of narrow and broad negation, corresponding to prefixal negation (unhappy) and free-standing negation (not happy) respectively, with that of non-negation (happy). Three artificial prefixes were invented to express the three meanings above. The meaning scope expressed by the negation types was manipulated in the experiments, and the processing of the three forms was tested through a picture-word verification task. In Experiment 1, the scope expressed by prefixal negation was included in the scope expressed by free-standing negation, while in Experiment 2, there was no overlap between the two negation types and the scope of free-standing negation was limited to the intermediate range of a scale. Experiment 1 showed that narrow negation is more difficult to process than the non-negated meanings, but not as difficult as broad negation. Experiment 2 showed that when the meaning scope of broad negation was restricted to the middle range, the processing difficulty found in Experiment 1 disappeared, as it did not take longer for participants to identify the middle range compared to the ends of the scale. We show that the chunking of the negated meanings relative to one another plays a role in the processing cost of these forms., (© 2019 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)