Related papers: Analyzing language development from a network appr…
The success of neural language models (LMs) on many technological tasks has brought about their potential relevance as scientific theories of language despite some clear differences between LM training and child language acquisition. In…
Around ten percent of children may present with a disorder where language does not develop as expected. This often affects vocabulary skills, i.e., finding the words to express wants, needs and ideas, which can influence behaviours linked…
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…
The network characteristics based on the phonological similarities in the lexicons of several languages were examined. These languages differed widely in their history and linguistic structure, but commonalities in the network…
Methods from statistical physics, such as those involving complex networks, have been increasingly used in quantitative analysis of linguistic phenomena. In this paper, we represented pieces of text with different levels of simplification…
The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…
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…
Evolving out-of-equilibrium networks have been under intense scrutiny recently. In many real-world settings the number of links added per new node is not constant but depends on the time at which the node is introduced in the system. This…
Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…
When faced with self-regulation challenges, children have been known the use their language to inhibit their emotions and behaviors. Yet, to date, there has been a critical lack of evidence regarding what patterns in their speech children…
Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly being studied as models of human language learners. Due to the nascency of the field, it is not well-established whether LMs exhibit similar learning dynamics to humans, and there are few direct…
We study the introduction of lexical innovations into a community of language users. Lexical innovations, i.e., new terms added to people's vocabulary, play an important role in the process of language evolution. Nowadays, information is…
Oral narrative skills are strong predictors of later literacy development. This study examines the features of oral narratives from children who were identified by experts as requiring intervention. Using simple machine learning methods, we…
How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here,…
Patterns of word use both reflect and influence a myriad of human activities and interactions. Like other entities that are reproduced and evolve, words rise or decline depending upon a complex interplay between {their intrinsic properties…
This paper investigates contextual word representation models from the lens of similarity analysis. Given a collection of trained models, we measure the similarity of their internal representations and attention. Critically, these models…
We study the evolution of networks when the creation and decay of links are based on the position of nodes in the network measured by their centrality. We show that the same network dynamics arises under various centrality measures, and…
Social networks existing among employees, customers or users of various IT systems have become one of the research areas of growing importance. A social network consists of nodes - social entities and edges linking pairs of nodes. In…
Statistical methods have been widely employed in recent years to grasp many language properties. The application of such techniques have allowed an improvement of several linguistic applications, which encompasses machine translation,…