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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Oct 1.
Published in final edited form as: Psychon Bull Rev. 2014 Oct;21(5):1112–1130. doi: 10.3758/s13423-014-0585-6

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

Cross-linguistic word frequency distributions using words from a Swadesh list (data provided by Calude & Pagel, 2011). Here, the x-location of each point (word) is fixed across languages according to the aggregate frequency rank of the word’s meaning on an independent set of data. The systematicity here means that the word frequency distribution falls off similarly according to word meaning across languages and approximately according to a power law like Eq. 2 (red)