These are from two different universities, and both seek to quantify the relationship between frequency of use and regularization. The most significant fact coming out of the papers is that words have a strikingly slow rate of evolution which is modified by the frequency of use, just like genes. There is a neat summary here.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/pdf/449665a.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/pdf/nature06176.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v449/n7163/pdf/nature06137.pdf
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Language Evolution 
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