Related papers: A bifurcation threshold for contact-induced langua…
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…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
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…
With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language…
Despite the centrality of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) to bilingualism research, human studies often yield conflicting results due to inherent experimental variance. We address these inconsistencies by using language models (LMs) as…
In multilingual societies, it is common to encounter different language varieties. Various approaches have been proposed to discuss different mechanisms of language shift. However, current models exploring language shift in languages in…
Contact between languages has the potential to transmit vocabulary and other language features; however, this does not always happen. Here, an iterated learning model is used to examine, in a simple way, the resistance of languages to…
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…
An in-depth analytic study of a model of language dynamics is presented: a model which tackles the problem of the coexistence of two languages within a closed community of speakers taking into account bilingualism and incorporating a…
Languages and genes are both transmitted from generation to generation, with opportunity for differential reproduction and survivorship of forms. Here we apply a rigorous inference framework, drawn from population genetics, to distinguish…
Language change is a complex social phenomenon, revealing pathways of communication and sociocultural influence. But, while language change has long been a topic of study in sociolinguistics, traditional linguistic research methods rely on…
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…
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.…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
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…
Humans appear to have a critical period (CP) for language acquisition: Second language (L2) acquisition becomes harder after early childhood, and ceasing exposure to a first language (L1) after this period (but not before) typically does…
A simple model of language evolution, proposed in \cite{K_N}, is characterized by a pay-off in communicative function, and by an error in learning, that measures the accuracy in language acquisition. In the mean field approximation, this…
It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…
Motivated by the dramatic disappearance of endangered languages observed in recent years, a great deal of attention has been given to the modeling of language competition in order to understand the factors that promote the disappearance of…