Related papers: Cognitive forces shape the dynamics of word usage …
Word similarities affect language acquisition and use in a multi-relational way barely accounted for in the literature. We propose a multiplex network representation of this mental lexicon of word similarities as a natural framework for…
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…
Classifying the information content of neural spike trains in a linguistic endeavor, an uncertainty relation emerges between the bit size of a word and its duration. This uncertainty is associated with the task of synchronizing the spike…
The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…
Homophily and social influence are the fundamental mechanisms that drive the evolution of attitudes, beliefs and behaviour within social groups. Homophily relates the similarity between pairs of individuals' attitudinal states to their…
In this paper, dynamical systems theory and bifurcation theory are applied to investi- gate the rich dynamical behaviours observed in three simple disease models. The 2- and 3-dimensional models we investigate have arisen in previous…
Color naming in natural languages is not arbitrary: it reflects efficient partitions of perceptual color space modulated by the relative needs to communicate about different colors. These psychophysical and communicative constraints help…
What happens when a new social convention replaces an old one? While the possible forces favoring norm change - such as institutions or committed activists - have been identified since a long time, little is known about how a population…
Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can…
We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length \cite{Zipf1935} and the average information content \cite{Piantadosi2011}, but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of…
Slang is a common type of informal language, but its flexible nature and paucity of data resources present challenges for existing natural language systems. We take an initial step toward machine generation of slang by developing a…
Human cognition exhibits strong circadian modulation, yet its influence on high-dimensional semantic behavior remains poorly understood. Using large-scale Reddit data, we quantify time-of-day variation in language use by embedding text into…
Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user…
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…
Using the frequency of keywords is a classic approach in the formal analysis of text, but has the drawback of glossing over the relationality of word meanings. Word embedding models overcome this problem by constructing a standardized and…
The cognitive process of opinion formation is often characterized by stubbornness or resistance of agents to changes of opinion. To capture such a feature we introduce a constant latency time in the standard voter model of opinion dynamics:…
This study presents a fascinating linguistic property related to the number of letters in words and their corresponding numerical values. By selecting any arbitrary word, counting its constituent letters, and subsequently spelling out the…
In this work we extend previous analyses of linguistic networks by adopting a multi-layer network framework for modelling the human mental lexicon, i.e. an abstract mental repository where words and concepts are stored together with their…
In this paper, we argue that some fundamental concepts and tools of signal processing may be effectively applied to represent and interpret social cognition processes. From this viewpoint, individuals or, more generally, social stimuli are…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…