Emotional factors like valence, concreteness, and arousal have been shown to influence lexical processing, in that they exhibit non-neutrality, positivity, and negativity biases, respectively (e.g. Kuperman et al. 2014, J. Exp. Psych.; Pauligk et al. 2019, Scientific Reports). Since even weak cognitive biases can yield strong tendencies on a larger time scale, we investigate diachronic long-term effects of these factors on the reproductive success of English words. We operationalize reproductive success by means of diachronic growth, age-of-acquisition and prevalence of words. By combining emotional norms (Warriner et al. 2013, Beh. Res. Meth.; Kuperman et al. 2012, Beh. Res. Meth.) with historical language data (COHA; controlling for semantic shift), we show that long-term effects of valence and concreteness largely mimic cognitive short-term biases. However, arousal, quite surprisingly, exhibits a clearly positive effect on lexical reproduction. We attribute this reversed effect to (i) interactions among emotional factors and (ii) social effects.

Words that are learned early were shown to be semantically more stable, and vice versa (Cassani et al. 2021, Cognitive Science). Semantic change, however, has multiple aspects. In this diachronic corpus study, we examine the relationship between the age of acquisition (AoA) of words and a set of different measures of semantic change: change in a word's polysemy; overall semantic displacement; and average extent of semantic fluctuation. All measures are based on diachronically layered sense distributions (Hu et al. 2019, ACL) derived from the Corpus of Historical American English. AoA is taken from Kuperman et al. (2012, Behav. Res. Meth.). Taking interactions with frequency into account, we show that semantic displacement and fluctuation are positively associated with AoA as expected. Early acquisition is associated with an increase in polysemy. This hints at the relevance of semantic (metaphorical) extension in the early acquisition of the lexicon.