Related papers: Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized…
Lexical iconicity, a direct relation between a word's meaning and its form, is an important aspect of every natural language, most commonly manifesting through sound-meaning associations. Since Large language models' (LLMs') access to both…
In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…
The word-frequency distribution of a text written by an author is well accounted for by a maximum entropy distribution, the RGF (random group formation)-prediction. The RGF-distribution is completely determined by the a priori values of the…
Frequency counts are a measure of how much use a language makes of a linguistic unit, such as a phoneme or word. However, what is often important is not the units themselves, but the contrasts between them. A measure is therefore needed for…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its…
Recent research argues that exact recursive numeral systems optimize communicative efficiency by balancing a tradeoff between the size of the numeral lexicon and the average morphosyntactic complexity (roughly length in morphemes) of…
The debate surrounding language identification has gained renewed attention in recent years, especially with the rapid evolution of AI-powered language models. However, the non-AI-based approaches to language identification have been…
Recent studies have investigated siamese network architectures for learning invariant speech representations using same-different side information at the word level. Here we investigate systematically an often ignored component of siamese…
Zipf's law establishes a scaling behavior for word-frequencies in large text corpora. The appearance of Zipfian properties in human language has been previously explained as an optimization problem for the interests of speakers and hearers.…
Word class flexibility refers to the phenomenon whereby a single word form is used across different grammatical categories. Extensive work in linguistic typology has sought to characterize word class flexibility across languages, but…
Word frequency is assumed to correlate with word familiarity, but the strength of this correlation has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we report on our analysis of the correlation between a word familiarity rating list…
Statistical methods have been widely employed in recent years to grasp many language properties. The application of such techniques have allowed an improvement of several linguistic applications, which encompasses machine translation,…
We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical…
The article presents a new interpretation for Zipf-Mandelbrot's law in natural language which rests on two areas of information theory. Firstly, we construct a new class of grammar-based codes and, secondly, we investigate properties of…
Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, feel and behave. Such characteristics…
While textual frequency has been validated as relevant to human cognition in reading speed, its relatedness to Large Language Models (LLMs) is seldom studied. We propose a novel research direction in terms of textual data frequency, which…
The number of frequencies of factors of length $n+1$ in a recurrent aperiodic infinite word does not exceed $3\Delta \C(n)$, where $\Delta \C (n)$ is the first difference of factor complexity, as shown by Boshernitzan. Pelantov\'a together…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…
Though English sentences are typically inflexible vis-\`a-vis word order, constituents often show far more variability in ordering. One prominent theory presents the notion that constituent ordering is directly correlated with constituent…