# Finding Concept-specific Biases in Form--Meaning Associations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.06325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06325/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2021.

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

- [Formal Limitations on the Measurement of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04251/) (2018)
- [Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03774/) (2020)
- [Meaning to Form: Measuring Systematicity as Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05906/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [How (Non-)Optimal is the Lexicon?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14279/) (2021)
- [Modeling the Unigram Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02289/) (2021)
- [Adversarially Probing Cross-Family Sound Symbolism in 27 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12245/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small, cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For instance, it has been claimed (Blasi et al., 2016) that the word for "tongue" is more likely than chance to contain the phone [l]. By controlling for the influence of language family and geographic proximity within a very large concept-aligned, cross-lingual lexicon, we extend methods previously used to detect within language non-arbitrariness (Pimentel et al., 2019) to measure cross-linguistic associations. We find that there is a significant effect of non-arbitrariness, but it is unsurprisingly small (less than 0.5% on average according to our information-theoretic estimate). We also provide a concept-level analysis which shows that a quarter of the concepts considered in our work exhibit a significant level of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. In sum, the paper provides new methods to detect cross-linguistic associations at scale, and confirms their effects are minor.