AUTHOR=Kornai András TITLE=Vocabulary: Common or Basic? JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=12 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.730112 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.730112 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

Neither linguistics nor psychology offers a single, unified notion of simplicity, and therefore the simplest “core” layer of vocabulary is hard to define in theory and hard to pinpoint in practice. In section 1 we briefly survey the main approaches, and distinguish two that are highly relevant to lexicography: we will call these common and basic. In sections 2 and 3 we compare these approaches, and in section 4 we point the reader to Kolmogorov complexity, unfamiliar as it may be to most working psychologists, lexicographers, and educators, as the best formal means to deal with core vocabulary.