Zipf’s Laws of Meaning and Semanticity in Catalan Language Acquisition

Abstract

This study explores Zipf’s laws of meaning and semanticity in Catalan child language acquisition, focusing on the interaction between syntactic regularities and semantic relationships. Building on previous research on semantic organization and Zipfian distributions in adult speech, using the CHILDES database, we analyse longitudinal corpora of Catalan-speaking children to test whether these statistical laws also emerge early in language development. Statistical and computational analyses show that rank–frequency distributions and related linguistic laws (Zipf’s law, the Brevity law, and Heaps–Herdan’s law) hold across different age groups and interaction contexts, whereas semantic regularities exhibit a weaker frequency–meaning correlation among younger speakers. However, the measure of semanticity captures the joint evolutionary changes in meaning and structural organization during early language acquisition.