Linguistic Laws in Speech: The Case of Catalan and Spanish
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Hernandez-Fernandez A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC7514498 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Physical manifestations of linguistic units include sources of variability due to factors of speech production which are by definition excluded from counts of linguistic symbols. In this work, we examine whether linguistic laws hold with respect to the physical manifestations of linguistic units in spoken English. The data we analyse come from a phonetically transcribed database of acoustic recordings of spontaneous speech known as the Buckeye Speech corpus. First, we verify with unprecedented accuracy that acoustically transcribed durations of linguistic units at several scales comply with a lognormal distribution, and we quantitatively justify this 'lognormality law' using a stochastic generative model. Second, we explore the four classical linguistic laws (Zipf's Law, Herdan's Law, Brevity Law and Menzerath-Altmann's Law (MAL)) in oral communication, both in physical units and in symbolic units measured in the speech transcriptions, and find that the validity of these laws is typically stronger when using physical units than in their symbolic counterpart. Additional results include (i) coining a Herdan's Law in physical units, (ii) a precise mathematical formulation of Brevity Law, which we show to be connected to optimal compression principles in information theory and allows to formulate and validate yet another law which we call the size-rank law or (iii) a mathematical derivation of MAL which also highlights an additional regime where the law is inverted. Altogether, these results support the hypothesis that statistical laws in language have a physical origin.
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Project description:In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its frequency rank, and the meaning-frequency law, relating the frequency of a word with its number of meanings. Although these laws were formulated more than half a century ago, they have been only investigated in a few languages. Here we present the first study of these laws in Catalan. We verify these laws in Catalan via the relationship among their exponents and that of the rank-frequency law. We present a new protocol for the analysis of these Zipfian laws that can be extended to other languages. We report the first evidence of two marked regimes for these laws in written language and speech, paralleling the two regimes in Zipf's rank-frequency law in large multi-author corpora discovered in early 2000s. Finally, the implications of these two regimes will be discussed.
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Project description:Studies testing linguistic laws outside language have provided important insights into the organization of biological systems. For example, patterns consistent with Zipf's law of abbreviation (which predicts a negative relationship between word length and frequency of use) have been found in the vocal and non-vocal behaviour of a range of animals, and patterns consistent with Menzerath's law (according to which longer sequences are made up of shorter constituents) have been found in primate vocal sequences, and in genes, proteins and genomes. Both laws have been linked to compression-the information theoretic principle of minimizing code length. Here, we present the first test of these laws in animal gestural communication. We initially did not find the negative relationship between gesture duration and frequency of use predicted by Zipf's law of abbreviation, but this relationship was seen in specific subsets of the repertoire. Furthermore, a pattern opposite to that predicted was seen in one subset of gestures-whole body signals. We found a negative correlation between number and mean duration of gestures in sequences, in line with Menzerath's law. These results provide the first evidence that compression underpins animal gestural communication, and highlight an important commonality between primate gesturing and language.
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Project description:With bilingual children, intervention for speech sound disorders must consider both of the child's phonological systems, which are known to interact with each other in development. Further, cross-linguistic generalization following intervention for bilingual children with speech sound disorders (i.e., the impact of treatment in one language on the other) has been documented to varying degrees in some prior studies. However, none to date have documented the cross-linguistic impact of treatment with complex targets (e.g., consonant clusters) for bilingual children. Because complex phonological targets have been shown to induce system-wide generalization within a single language, the potential for bilingual children to generalize learning across languages could impact the efficiency of intervention in this population. This pilot intervention study examines the system-wide, cross-linguistic effects of treatment targeting consonant clusters in Spanish for two Spanish-English bilingual children with phonological disorder. Treatment was provided with 45-minute sessions in Spanish via teletherapy, three times per week for six weeks. Comprehensive phonological probes were administered in English and Spanish prior to intervention and across multiple baselines. Pre-intervention data were compared to data from probes administered during and after intervention to generate qualitative and quantitative measures of treatment outcomes and cross-linguistic generalization. Results indicate a medium effect size for system-wide generalization in Spanish (the language of treatment) and English (not targeted in treatment), for both participants (mean effect size in Spanish: 3.6; English 4.3). These findings have implications for across-language transfer and system-wide generalization in treatment for bilingual children.
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Project description:Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of statistical patterns of language in acoustics are biased by the arbitrary, language-dependent segmentation of the signal, and virtually precludes the possibility of making comparative studies between human voice and other animal communication systems. Here we bridge this gap by proposing a method that allows to measure such patterns in acoustic signals of arbitrary origin, without needs to have access to the language corpus underneath. The method has been applied to sixteen different human languages, recovering successfully some well-known laws of human communication at timescales even below the phoneme and finding yet another link between complexity and criticality in a biological system. These methods further pave the way for new comparative studies in animal communication or the analysis of signals of unknown code.
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Project description:Two language laws have been identified as consistent patterns shaping animal behaviour, both acting on the organizational level of communicative systems. Zipf's law of brevity describes a negative relationship between behavioural length and frequency. Menzerath's law defines a negative correlation between the number of behaviours in a sequence and average length of the behaviour composing it. Both laws have been linked with the information-theoretic principle of compression, which tends to minimize code length. We investigated their presence in a case study of male chimpanzee sexual solicitation gesture. We failed to find evidence supporting Zipf's law of brevity, but solicitation gestures followed Menzerath's law: longer sequences had shorter average gesture duration. Our results extend previous findings suggesting gesturing may be limited by individual energetic constraints. However, such patterns may only emerge in sufficiently large datasets. Chimpanzee gestural repertoires do not appear to manifest a consistent principle of compression previously described in many other close-range systems of communication. Importantly, the same signallers and signals were previously shown to adhere to these laws in subsets of the repertoire when used in play; highlighting that, in addition to selection on the signal repertoire, ape gestural expression appears shaped by factors in the immediate socio-ecological context.
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