We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic factors -- semantic, distributional, and phonological -- that we hypothesize are predictive of lexical decline, in which words greatly decrease in frequency over time. Using historical data across three languages (English, French, and German), we find that most of our proposed factors show a significant difference in the expected direction between each curated set of declining words and their matched stable words. Moreover, logistic regression analyses show that semantic and distributional factors are significant in predicting declining words. Further diachronic analysis reveals that declining words tend to decrease in the diversity of their lexical contexts over time, gradually narrowing their 'ecological niches'.

本文采用进化论的视角，结合社会和认知因素，探讨心理语言学方面的语义、分布和语音等因素，分析三种语言（英语、法语和德语）历史数据，并利用逻辑回归分析，表明语义和分布等因素能有效预测词汇下降，而这些下降词汇往往会随着时间的推移而逐渐缩小它们的“生态位”。

量化词汇衰退中的认知因素