Unzipping Zipf's Law: Solution to a century-old linguistic problem
Thursday, August 10, 2017 - 08:32
in Psychology & Sociology
Did you know that in every language, the most frequent word occurs twice as often as the second most frequent word? This phenomenon called 'Zipf's law' is more than one century old, but until now, scientists have not been able to elucidate it exactly. Sander Lestrade, a linguist at Radboud University in The Netherlands, proposes a new solution to this notorious problem in PLOS ONE.