This article is better: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576262572791243528.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487045476045

This article is better: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576262572791243528.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870454760457626... Comments from someone who reviewed the paper and was skeptical of the findings are available at: http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~sproatr/newindex/atkinson.html http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~sproatr/newindex/atkinson.html There are links to some of his other papers on the guy's home page (http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/quentin-atkinson/ http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/quentin-atkinson/), here's two on related topics: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/04/01/rspb.2010.0051.full.pdf http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/04... http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2010vol88/PDFonline/Jass2010_18_Atkinson.pdf http://www.isita-org.com/jass/Contents/2010vol88/PDFonline/J... Interesting quote from the second paper, which looks at vocabulary changes in languages: "Recent work has also shown that rates of lexical change are predictable based on the frequency of use and part of speech (Pagel et al. 2007) and that some meanings have a lexical ‘half-life’—the time after which there is a 50 per cent chance that the word is replaced—in excess of 20 000 year"