Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the phenomenon of colexification, where a sin- gle wordform is associated with multiple meanings. Previ- ous research on colexification has primarily focused on em- pirical studies of different properties of the meanings that de- termine colexification, such as semantic similarity or meaning frequency. Meanwhile, little attention was paid to the word- forms' properties, despite being the original approach advo- cated by Zipf. Our preregistered study examines whether word length influences word choice for colexification using a novel dyadic communication game (N = 64) and a computational model grounded in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. Contrary to initial predictions, participants did not exhibit a strong preference for efficient colexification (namely colexi- fying multiple concepts using short words, when long alter- natives are available). The results align more closely with a simpler coordination model, where dyads align on a function- ing lexical convention with relatively little influence from the efficiency of that convention. Our study highlights the pos- sibility that colexification choices are strongly determined by the pressure for coordination, with weaker influences from se- mantic similarity or meaning frequency. This is most likely explained by weak pressure for efficiency in our experimental design.