Related papers: Understanding confounding effects in linguistic co…

In a consistent text, many words and phrases are repeatedly used in more than one sentence. When an identical phrase (a set of consecutive words) is repeated in different sentences, the constituent words of those sentences tend to be…

There has been a long standing interest in understanding `Social Influence' both in Social Sciences and in Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we present a novel approach to study and measure interpersonal influence in daily…

When human listeners try to guess the spatial position of a speech source, they are influenced by the speaker's production level, regardless of the intensity level reaching their ears. Because the perception of distance is a very difficult…

Results in epidemiology and social science often require the removal of confounding effects from measurements of the pairwise correlation of variables in survey data. This is typically accomplished by some variant of linear regression…

The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but…

Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for…

This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical…

We ask where, and under what conditions, dyslexic reading costs arise in a large-scale naturalistic reading dataset. Using eye-tracking aligned to word-level features (word length, frequency, and predictability), we model how each feature…

Large language models (LLMs) have become common decision-support tools across educational and professional contexts, raising questions about how their outputs shape human critical thinking. Prior work suggests that the amount of AI…

Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…

Real-time sentence comprehension imposes a significant load on working memory, as comprehenders must maintain contextual information to anticipate future input. While measures of such load have played an important role in psycholinguistic…

The present study uses a computational approach to examine the role of semantic constraints in normal reading. This methodology avoids confounds inherent in conventional measures of predictability, allowing for theoretically deeper accounts…

Power differences shape human communication through well documented socio cognitive effects, including language coordination, pronoun usage, authority bias, and harmful compliance. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit…

Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of…

Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…

This paper investigates the use of word surprisal, a measure of the predictability of a word in a given context, as a feature to aid speech synthesis prosody. We explore how word surprisal extracted from large language models (LLMs)…

Understanding texts requires memory: the reader has to keep in mind enough words to create meaning. This calls for a relation between the memory of the reader and the structure of the text. To investigate this interaction, we first identify…

The extent to which individual language characteristics influence tokenization and language modeling is an open question. Differences in morphological systems have been suggested as both unimportant and crucial to consider (Cotterell et…

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

The conformity effect describes the tendency of individuals to align their responses with the majority. Studying this bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, as LLMs are increasingly used in various information-seeking and…