[Add publication] #624
Description
Action
Add publication
Title
Semantic change in adults is not primarily a generational phenomenon
Shorthand
pnas.2426815122
Author
Gaurav Kamath
Names
Gaurav Kamath, Michelle Yang, Siva Reddy, Morgan Sonderegger, Dallas Card
Venue
PNAS
Link
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2426815122
Year
2025
Month
07
Day
28
Tags
PNAS, semantic change, word meaning, sociolinguistics
Code
https://github.com/McGill-NLP/meaning-change
Webpage
No response
Video
No response
Demo
No response
Thumbnail
https://grvkamath.github.io/files/pnas_fig2.png
Abstract
A central question in the study of language change is whether or not such change is generational. If a language changes over time generation-by-generation, the process looks as follows: New generations of speakers introduce innovations, while older speakers conserve their usage patterns, and the language changes as new generations replace older ones. At the opposite extreme, language change could be a zeitgeist phenomenon, in which changes are universally adopted by speakers simultaneously, regardless of age or generational cohort. This paper asks this question in the context of word meaning change. We analyze meaning change in over 100 words across more than 7.9 million U.S. congressional speeches, to observe whether, when a word sense rises or falls in prominence, adult speakers from different generations uniformly adopt it, or those from older generations conserve their prior usage. Using language model-based word sense induction methods, we identify different senses of each word, and then model the prevalence of each of these word senses as a function of time and speaker age. We find that most words show a small but statistically significant effect of speaker age; across almost 140 y of Congress, older speakers typically take longer than younger speakers to follow changes in word usage, but nevertheless do so within a few years. Our findings indicate that despite minor age-based differences, word meaning change among mature speakers is likely not a generational process, but rather a zeitgeist process, in which older adult speakers can readily adopt new word usage patterns.