Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In English binomial expressions, “bread and butter” is preferred over “butter and bread”. Morgan & Levy (2015) show that for these types of expressions, frequently used phrases tend to have stronger, more extreme preferences. In contrast, there is roughly an equal preference for “bishops and rooks” versus “rooks and bishops”, a much less common pairing. This paper extends this research to the concept of Mandarin elastic word length, a phenomenon in which most Mandarin words have long and short forms. We find evidence for frequency-dependent regularization in the elastic length of Noun-Noun compounds in Chinese, demonstrating that frequency-dependent regularization extends to structures with more than two alternations and to languages other than English.