Related papers: Stability and Fluctuations in a Simple Model of Ph…
We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences…
We develop a model for the stability and maintenance of phonological categories. Examples of phonological categories are vowel sounds such as "i" and "e". We model such categories as consisting of collections of labeled exemplars that…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
Phonetics is the scientific field concerned with the study of how speech is produced, heard and perceived. It abounds with data, such as acoustic speech recordings, neuroimaging data, or articulatory data. In this paper, we provide an…
An auditory neuron can preserve the temporal fine structure of a low-frequency tone by phase-locking its response to the stimulus. Apart from sound localization, however, little is known about the role of this temporal information for…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
A formulation of bit-string models of language evolution, based on differential equations for the population speaking each language, is introduced and preliminarily studied. Connections with replicator dynamics and diffusion processes are…
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a…
We propose a stochastic model to study phonetic changes as an evolutionary process driven by social interactions between two groups of individuals with different phonological systems. Particularly, we focus on the changes in the place of…
A simple class of chaotic systems in a random environment is considered and the fluctuation theorem is extended under the assumption of reversibility.
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
We study the evolution of quantum fluctuations in systems known as time crystals, hypothetical systems for which the lowest energy state performs a periodic motion. We first discuss some general properties shared by time crystals, and…
We study the flat phase of nematic elastomer membranes with rotational symmetry spontaneously broken by in-plane nematic order. Such state is characterized by a vanishing elastic modulus for simple shear and soft transverse phonons. At…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
We numerically analyse quantum survival probability fluctuations in an open, classically chaotic system. In a quasi-classical regime, and in the presence of classical mixed phase space, such fluctuations are believed to exhibit a fractal…