Related papers: Cognitive forces shape the dynamics of word usage …

Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…

Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…

The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer-grained…

Proverbs are an essential component of language and culture, and though much attention has been paid to their history and currency, there has been comparatively little quantitative work on changes in the frequency with which they are used…

Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…

Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…

Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…

We study the dynamics of belief formation on multiple interconnected topics in networks of agents with a shared belief system. We establish sufficient conditions and necessary conditions under which sustained oscillations of beliefs arise…

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…

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…

By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…

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…

We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…

The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…

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…

The present study uses a computational approach to examine the role of semantic constraints in normal reading. This methodology avoids confounds inherent in conventional measures of predictability, allowing for theoretically deeper accounts…

We study the time taken by a language learner to correctly identify the meaning of all words in a lexicon under conditions where many plausible meanings can be inferred whenever a word is uttered. We show that the most basic form of…

Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…