@misc{SeržantMoroz2022,
  author    = {Seržant, Ilja A. and Moroz, George A.},
  title     = {Universal attractors in language evolution provide evidence for the kinds of efficiency pressures involved},
  series = {Zweitver{\"o}ffentlichungen der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe},
  volume    = {9},
  journal   = {Zweitver{\"o}ffentlichungen der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe},
  number    = {180},
  issn      = {1866-8380},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-58397},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-583976},
  pages     = {9},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {Efficiency is central to understanding the communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. However, efficiency management is a complex mechanism in which different efficiency effects-such as articulatory, processing and planning ease, mental accessibility, and informativity, online and offline efficiency effects-conspire to yield the coding of linguistic signs. While we do not yet exactly understand the interactional mechanism of these different effects, we argue that universal attractors are an important component of any dynamic theory of efficiency that would be aimed at predicting efficiency effects across languages. Attractors are defined as universal states around which language evolution revolves. Methodologically, we approach efficiency from a cross-linguistic perspective on the basis of a world-wide sample of 383 languages from 53 families, balancing all six macro-areas (Eurasia, North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Oceania). We explore the grammatical domain of verbal person-number subject indexes. We claim that there is an attractor state in this domain to which languages tend to develop and tend not to leave if they happen to comply with the attractor in their earlier stages of evolution. The attractor is characterized by different lengths for each person and number combination, structured along Zipf's predictions. Moreover, the attractor strongly prefers non-compositional, cumulative coding of person and number. On the basis of these and other properties of the attractor, we conclude that there are two domains in which efficiency pressures are most powerful: strive towards less processing and articulatory effort. The latter, however, is overridden by constant information flow. Strive towards lower lexicon complexity and memory costs are weaker efficiency pressures for this grammatical category due to its order of frequency.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{vandeVijverSennemaZimmer–Stahl2006,
  author    = {van de Vijver, Ruben and Sennema, Anke and Zimmer-Stahl, Anne},
  title     = {An analysis of pitch and duration in material used to test L2 processing of words},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19583},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost.},
  language  = {en}
}