Homophony's widespread presence in natural languages is a controversial topic. Recent theories of language optimality have tried to justify its prevalence, despite its negative effects on cognitive processing time; e.g., Piantadosi et al. (2012) argued homophony enables the reuse of efficient wordforms and is thus beneficial for languages. This hypothesis has recently been challenged by Trott and Bergen (2020), who posit that good wordforms are more often homophonous simply because they are more phonotactically probable. In this paper, we join in on the debate. We first propose a new information-theoretic quantification of a language's homophony: the sample R\'enyi entropy. Then, we use this quantification to revisit Trott and Bergen's claims. While their point is theoretically sound, a specific methodological issue in their experiments raises doubts about their results. After addressing this issue, we find no clear pressure either towards or against homophony -- a much more nuanced result than either Piantadosi et al.'s or Trott and Bergen's findings.

翻译：同性恋在自然语言中的广泛存在是一个有争议的话题。 最近的语言优化理论试图为其流行辩护,尽管其对认知处理时间产生了负面影响;例如,Piantadosi等人(2012年)认为,同质调可以重新使用高效的词形,因此对语言有利。 最近Trott和Bergen(202020年)对这一假设提出了挑战,他们认为,好词形往往同质化,只是因为它们在口交方面的可能性更大。在本文中,我们共同参与辩论。我们首先提议对一种语言的同质词进行新的信息理论量化:样本R\'enyi entropy。然后,我们用这种量化来重新审视Trott和Bergen的主张。虽然它们的观点在理论上是有道理的,但实验中的具体方法问题引起了对其结果的怀疑。在解决这一问题后,我们没有发现对同质拼音的明显压力或反对。 与Piantadosi 等人或Trott和Bergen的调查结果相比,结果要更加微妙。