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Language change involves the competition between alternative linguistic forms (1). The spontaneous evolution of these forms typically results in monotonic growths or decays (2, 3) like in winner-take-all attractor behaviors. In the case of…
Surveys have recently gained popularity as a tool to study large language models. By comparing survey responses of models to those of human reference populations, researchers aim to infer the demographics, political opinions, or values best…
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…
This paper presents a new model for word sense disambiguation formulated in terms of evolutionary game theory, where each word to be disambiguated is represented as a node on a graph whose edges represent word relations and senses are…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
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…
Adult language learning varies greatly among individuals. Traditionally associated with frontotemporal language regions, this variability is increasingly seen as stemming from distributed brain networks. However, the role of these networks…
Word ordering is a constrained language generation task taking unordered words as input. Existing work uses linear models and neural networks for the task, yet pre-trained language models have not been studied in word ordering, let alone…
Neural language models trained with a predictive or masked objective have proven successful at capturing short and long distance syntactic dependencies. Here, we focus on verb argument structure in German, which has the interesting property…
A theory of language learning is described, which uses Bayesian induction of feature structures (scripts) and script functions. Each word sense in a language is mentally represented by an m-script, a script function which embodies all the…
As language technologies gain prominence in real-world settings, it is important to understand how changes to language affect reader perceptions. This can be formalized as the causal effect of varying a linguistic attribute (e.g.,…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
We use Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory in order to study the evolution of words and the population dynamics of a system comprising two interacting species which initially speak two different languages.…
A frequent object of study in linguistic typology is the order of elements {demonstrative, adjective, numeral, noun} in the noun phrase. The goal is to predict the relative frequencies of these orders across languages. Here we use Poisson…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Temporal information conveyed by language describes how the world around us changes through time. Events, durations and times are all temporal elements that can be viewed as intervals. These intervals are sometimes temporally related in…
A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for…
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…
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…