Related papers: How individuals change language
Language has been a dynamic system and word meanings always have been changed over times. Every time a novel concept or sense is introduced, we need to assign it a word to express it. Also, some changes have happened because the result of a…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Computational modeling plays an essential role in the study of language emergence. It aims to simulate the conditions and learning processes that could trigger the emergence of a structured language within a simulated controlled…
Is it possible to develop a `physics of language' which can explain the spatial, temporal and social patterns we see, and which can predict future change like we forecast the weather? Such a theory is likely to involve ideas from…
We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information is…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
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…
The socioeconomic background of people and how they use standard forms of language are not independent, as demonstrated in various sociolinguistic studies. However, the extent to which these correlations may be influenced by the mixing of…
Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…
Most people participate in meetings almost every day, multiple times a day. The study of meetings is important, but also challenging, as it requires an understanding of social signals and complex interpersonal dynamics. Our aim this work is…
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between…
The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker. To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language…
Languages continually evolve in response to societal events, resulting in new terms and shifts in meanings. These changes have significant implications for computer applications, including automatic translation and chatbots, making it…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…
Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…
Discovering and quantifying the drivers of language change is a major challenge. Hypotheses about causal factors proliferate, but are difficult to rigorously test. Here we ask a simple question: can 20th Century changes in English English…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Language evolution might have preferred certain prior social configurations over others. Experiments conducted with models of different social structures (varying subgroup interactions and the role of a dominant interlocutor) suggest that…