Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human languages can be seen as socially evolved systems thathave been structured to optimize information flow incommunication. Communication appears to proceed both moreefficiently and more fluently when information is distributedevenly across the linguistic signal. In previous work (Ramscaret al., 2013), we used tools from information theory to examinehow naming systems evolved to meet this requirementhistorically, and how, over the past several hundred years,social legislation and rapid population growth have disruptednaming practices in the West, making names ever harder toprocess and remember. In support of these observations, wepresent findings from three experiments investigating namefluency, recognition, and recall. These results provideconverging empirical evidence for an optimal solution to namedesign, and offer a more nuanced understanding of how socialengineering has impaired the structure of names in memory.