  Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide
ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final
segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the
likelihood of reduction by speakers (lower). This has led to the conjecture --
as in Wedel et al. (2019b), but common elsewhere -- that languages have evolved
to provide more information earlier in words than later. Information-theoretic
methods to establish such tendencies in lexicons have suffered from several
methodological shortcomings that leave open the question of whether this high
word-initial informativeness is actually a property of the lexicon or simply an
artefact of the incremental nature of recognition. In this paper, we point out
the confounds in existing methods for comparing the informativeness of segments
early in the word versus later in the word, and present several new measures
that avoid these confounds. When controlling for these confounds, we still find
evidence across hundreds of languages that indeed there is a cross-linguistic
tendency to front-load information in words.
