Related papers: Actuation without production bias
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…
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…
Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…
Recently, social phenomena have received a lot of attention not only from social scientists, but also from physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists, in the emerging interdisciplinary field of complex system science. Opinion…
Phonetics is the scientific field concerned with the study of how speech is produced, heard and perceived. It abounds with data, such as acoustic speech recordings, neuroimaging data, or articulatory data. In this paper, we provide an…
Acoustic vowel dynamics have some speaker-identifying characteristics, which have been ascribed to individual properties of articulatory strategies: formant transitions have a particular shape because speakers move their articulators, using…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
Designing feasible control strategies for opinion dynamics in complex social systems has never been an easy task. It requires a control protocol which 1) is not enforced on all individuals in the society, and 2) does not exclusively rely on…
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…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
Brownian motion have long been studied on a diversity of fields, not only in physics of statistical mechanics, but also in biological models, finance and economic process, and social systems. In the past twenty years, there has been a…
Linguistic norms emerge in human communities because people imitate each other. A shared linguistic system provides people with the benefits of shared knowledge and coordinated planning. Once norms are in place, why would they ever change?…
Communication is compositional if complex signals can be represented as a combination of simpler subparts. In this paper, we theoretically show that inductive biases on both the training framework and the data are needed to develop a…
Biological systems can share and collectively process information to yield emergent effects, despite inherent noise in communication. While man-made systems often employ intricate structural solutions to overcome noise, the structure of…
Decisions to pursue higher education are not fully explained by economic incentives, with social influence and peer effects playing a crucial, yet dynamically understudied, role. This paper develops a theoretical non-linear dynamics model…
We propose an opinion dynamics model based on Latan\'e's social impact theory. Actors in this model are heterogeneous and, in addition to opinions, are characterised by their varying levels of persuasion and support. The model is tested for…
In many prediction problems, the predictive model affects the distribution of the prediction target. This phenomenon is known as performativity and is often caused by the behavior of individuals with vested interests in the outcome of the…
We study the mutual influence of authority and persuasion in the flow of opinion. Many social organizations are characterized by a hierarchical structure where the propagation of opinion is asymmetric. In the normal flow of opinion…