# Disambiguatory Signals are Stronger in Word-initial Positions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02183 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02183/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03774/) (2020)
- [Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized for efficient communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01694/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15000/) (2021)
- [A Cross-Linguistic Pressure for Uniform Information Density in Word Order](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03734/) (2023)
- [Surprise! Uniform Information Density Isn't the Whole Story: Predicting Surprisal Contours in Long-form Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16062/) (2024)
- [How (Non-)Optimal is the Lexicon?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14279/) (2021)
- [The Impact of Word Splitting on the Semantic Content of Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14616/) (2024)
- [Information-Theoretic Characterization of Vowel Harmony: A Cross-Linguistic Study on Word Lists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04885/) (2023)
- [CiteFusion: An Ensemble Framework for Citation Intent Classification Harnessing Dual-Model Binary Couples and SHAP Analyses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13329/) (2024)
- [Modeling Bottom-up Information Quality during Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17047/) (2025)
- [Expect the Unexpected? Testing the Surprisal of Salient Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10724/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of reduction by speakers (lower). This has led to the conjecture -- as in Wedel et al. (2019b), but common elsewhere -- that languages have evolved to provide more information earlier in words than later. Information-theoretic methods to establish such tendencies in lexicons have suffered from several methodological shortcomings that leave open the question of whether this high word-initial informativeness is actually a property of the lexicon or simply an artefact of the incremental nature of recognition. In this paper, we point out the confounds in existing methods for comparing the informativeness of segments early in the word versus later in the word, and present several new measures that avoid these confounds. When controlling for these confounds, we still find evidence across hundreds of languages that indeed there is a cross-linguistic tendency to front-load information in words.