Uhm, basic linguistics teaches you about phonemes and morphemes. Phonemes are the smallest meaning-differentiating unit of a language, and a morpheme is the smallest meaning-carrying unit of a language.
Now, the length of a word is pretty arbitrary, it's a function of how the phonemes in the word are spelled out, but it doesn't say much about the morphemes of a word. Yes, generally a longer word can contain more morphemes, and thus more meaning, but, well, duh.
Something that would be genuinely interesting though is to compare the length of morphemes with their frequency or their complexity of meaning.
Exactly. That was my thought #1, phonetically rough=ruf. Thought #2: I'd love to see the study repeated in my native German, which is nearly phonetic and has a different way of constructing words. My wife's favorite (she's American): Glove = Handschuh, a shoe for your hands.
Flipping through and English-German dictionary you'll find a lot of specific English nouns that have longer compound nouns in German.
The rough <-> ruf example is a great one. One would have to argue that the "ough" spelling conveyed additional meaning in both written and spoken forms in order to support the hypothesis of the researchers, or else such examples are such a small subset of words studied that they are insignificant to the larger hypothesis.
I am somewhat aware of thinking about the etymology of word when using them. For example, whenever I use the word conspire I picture two people breathing together. Perhaps if I didn't picture this I'd just use the word "plot" instead in such cases.
Now, the length of a word is pretty arbitrary, it's a function of how the phonemes in the word are spelled out, but it doesn't say much about the morphemes of a word. Yes, generally a longer word can contain more morphemes, and thus more meaning, but, well, duh.
Something that would be genuinely interesting though is to compare the length of morphemes with their frequency or their complexity of meaning.