Code for "Miller’s Monkey Updated: Communicative Efficiency and the Statistics of Words in Natural Language"

{Spencer Caplan, Jordan Kodner} & Charles Yang

Cognition (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104466

Preprint available on LingBuzz and PsyArXiv

Please email either of the first authors if you have any questions. Our emails are provided in the paper.

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Setup

• Python code is written in version 2.7 with no external libraries.
• R scripts have been tested on version 4.0.2. The following R packages are required to create the plots and run statistical analysis. The scripts will attempt to install them automatically: cowplot, ggplot2, Hmisc, scales, reshape2, tidyr, dplyr, plyr, pracma, RColorBrewer, ggvoronoi, ggforce, lme4, stringr.

No other setup is required.

Running

The following script runs all generation and analysis:

$ runall.sh

Resources

Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX lexical database (release 2). Distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.

Princeton University. (2010). "About WordNet." WordNet. Princeton University.