  The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word
frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic
laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two
laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e.
the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of
abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a
previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English,
roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult
from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other
languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length:
syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that
both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all
the analyzed languages.
