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Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
According to the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), people are better at discriminating between speakers of their native language. Although this cognitive effect was largely studied in the literature, experiments have only been conducted on…
Grammatical forms are said to evolve via two main mechanisms. These are, respectively, the `descent' mechanism, where current forms can be seen to have descended (albeit with occasional modifications) from their roots in ancient languages,…
Dictionaries and phrase tables are the basis of modern statistical machine translation systems. This paper develops a method that can automate the process of generating and extending dictionaries and phrase tables. Our method can translate…
Given a language, which in this article is a set of strings of some fixed length, we study the problem of producing its elements by a procedure in which each position has its own local rule. We introduce a way of measuring how much…
Investigating linguistic relationships on a global scale requires analyzing diverse features such as syntax, phonology and prosody, which evolve at varying rates influenced by internal diversification, language contact, and sociolinguistic…
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages. Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective…
The grammars of natural languages may be learned by using genetic algorithms that reproduce and mutate grammatical rules and part-of-speech tags, improving the quality of later generations of grammatical components. Syntactic rules are…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
Natural languages are complexly structured entities. They exhibit characterising regularities that can be exploited to link them one another. In this work, I compare two morphological aspects of languages: Written Patterns and Sentence…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
In this paper, we try to explore the evolution of language through case calculations. First, we chose the novels of eleven British writers from 1400 to 2005 and found the corresponding works; Then, we use the natural language processing…
Understanding the distance between human languages is central to linguistics, anthropology, and tracing human evolutionary history. Yet, while linguistics has long provided rich qualitative accounts of cross-linguistic variation, a unified…
The recent availability of larger typological databases such as Haspelmath et al. (2005) has brought the linguistics community closer to having a solid, empirical foundation for making actual claims about prehistoric migrations, deep…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Historical linguists have identified regularities in the process of historic sound change. The comparative method utilizes those regularities to reconstruct proto-words based on observed forms in daughter languages. Can this process be…
Conducting experiments with diverse participants in their native languages can uncover insights into culture, cognition, and language that may not be revealed otherwise. However, conducting these experiments online makes it difficult to…
Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have…
Speech-comprehension difficulties are common among older people. Standard speech tests do not fully capture such difficulties because the tests poorly resemble the context-rich, story-like nature of ongoing conversation and are typically…
Most words have several senses and connotations which evolve in time due to semantic shift, so that closely related words may gain different or even opposite meanings over the years. This evolution is very relevant to the study of language…