Efficient communication and the organization of the lexicon

This work applies a language design perspective to the lexicon. It reviews and analyzes a recent body of work in cognitive science and linguistics that uses ideas from computer science, specifically information theory, to explore how structural features of lexicons can be explained by principles of efficient communication. It pays particular attention to four major properties of lexicons: the structure of word frequency distributions, the relationship between phonotactics and word length, the degree of lexical arbitrariness, and how lexicons are structured for child language learning.