Related papers: Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
Despite renewed interest in emergent language simulations with neural networks, little is known about the basic properties of the induced code, and how they compare to human language. One fundamental characteristic of the latter, known as…
Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…
In a communication scheme, there exist points at the transmitter and at the receiver where the wave is reduced to a finite set of functions of time which describe amplitudes and phases. For instance, the information is summarized in…
A set of data with positive values follows a Pareto distribution if the log-log plot of value versus rank is approximately a straight line. A Pareto distribution satisfies Zipf's law if the log-log plot has a slope of -1. Since many types…
We propose a formalization of the three-tier causal hierarchy of association, intervention, and counterfactuals as a series of probabilistic logical languages. Our languages are of strictly increasing expressivity, the first capable of…
We introduce a non-growth model that generates the power-law distribution with the Zipf exponent. There are N elements, each of which is characterized by a quantity, and at each time step these quantities are redistributed through binary…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
Promotional language has been increasingly used to aid the communication of innovative ideas in science. Yet, less is known about its role in the context of technological innovation. Here, we use a validated and domain-diagnosed lexicon of…
Cross-linguistic similarities are reflected by the speech sound systems of languages all over the world. In this work we try to model such similarities observed in the consonant inventories, through a complex bipartite network. We present a…
Zipf's law is one the most conspicuous empirical facts for cities, however, there is no convincing explanation for the scaling relation between rank and size and its scaling exponent. Based on the idea from general fractals and scaling,…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Zipf-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…
While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages…
We present the new empirical parameter $f_c$, the most probable usage frequency of a word in a language, computed via the distribution of documents over frequency $x$ of the word. This parameter allows for filtering the core lexicon of a…
In spoken languages, speakers divide up the space of phonetic possibilities into different regions, corresponding to different phonemes. We consider a simple exemplar model of how this division of phonetic space varies over time among a…
We prime-encode the natural numbers via recursive factorisation, iterated to the exponents, generating a corpus of planar rooted trees equivalently represented as Dyck words. This forms a deterministic text endowed with internal rules.…
The sound inventories of the world's languages self-organize themselves giving rise to similar cross-linguistic patterns. In this work we attempt to capture this phenomenon of self-organization, which shapes the structure of the consonant…