Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Lexical items in the vocabulary of a language undergo dramatic changes over time, explaining the mechanismsthat cause this change has been an important topic for the cognitive sciences. One particular focus for researchers has beenunderstanding the dynamics of change in word forms. The rate (or half-life) at which word forms change over time variesgreatly, and corpus-based cladistic studies have shown that certain properties, such as word frequency, length and age ofacquisition, can be used to predict this variation. We test through the use of an artificial language learning paradigm the extentto which these psycholinguistic factors affect accurate learning of word forms, linking processes of acquisition with processesof evolutionary change. Our findings provide an insight into the underlying mechanisms that drive diachronic change within alanguage’s vocabulary, highlighting the important role that the learning process has on lexical change.