Disambiguatory Signals are Stronger in Word-initial Positions
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Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of reduction by speakers (lower).This has led to the conjecture-as in Wedel et al. (2019b), but common elsewhere-that languages have evolved to provide more information earlier in words than later.Informationtheoretic methods to establish such tendencies in lexicons have suffered from several methodological shortcomings that leave open the question of whether this high word-initial informativeness is actually a property of the lexicon or simply an artefact of the incremental nature of recognition.In this paper, we point out the confounds in existing methods for comparing the informativeness of segments early in the word versus later in the word, and present several new measures that avoid these confounds.When controlling for these confounds, we still find evidence across hundreds of languages that indeed there is a cross-linguistic tendency to front-load information in words. 1
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Contextual cues are particularly effective when placed at the beginning of a sentence.
“Prior works further suggest that contextual cues are particularly effective when placed at the beginning of a sentence, therefore as prefixes (Pimentel et al., 2021).”
From CiteFusion: an ensemble framework for citation intent classification harnessing dual-model binary couples and SHAP analyses (2025) · cites this paper as Pimentel et al., 2021
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- Authors
- Pimentel, T., Cotterell, R., & Roark, B.
- Affiliations
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume
- Published
- 2021
- Pages
- 31-41
- OpenAlex
- W3126184680
- Cited by
- 10
- References
- 29
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 1.39
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- ETH Zürich Research Collection (cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Keywords
- lexical access, word recognition, information theory, cross-linguistic comparison
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