Zipf's Law in Aphasia Across Languages: A Comparison of English, Hungarian and Greek

Neophytou, Kyriaki; Egmond, Marjolein van; Avrutin, Sergey

doi:10.1080/09296174.2016.1263786

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…After some notable precursors [41–43], George Kingsley Zipf formulated and explained in [44,45] one of the most popular quantitative linguistic observations known in his honour as Zipf’s Law. He observed that the number of occurrences (frequency f ) of words with a given rank r is well approximated by a power-law dependenceffalse(rfalse)∼r−α.This is a solid linguistic law proven in many written corpora [5] and in spoken language [6], even though its variations have been discussed [46], as is the case of the evolution of the exponent in the ontogeny of language [7] or even in aphasia [47].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the physical origin of linguistic laws and lognormality in speech

et al. 2019

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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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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is a solid linguistic law proven in many written corpora [5] and in spoken language [6], even though its variations have been discussed [46], as is the case of the evolution of the exponent in the ontogeny of language [7] or even in aphasia [47].…”

Section: Zipf's Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the physical origin of linguistic laws and lognormality in speech

et al. 2019

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“…He observed that the number of occurrences of words with a given rank can be expressed as

, when ordering the words of written corpus in decreasing order by their frequency. This is a solid linguistic law proven in many written corpus [ 10 ] and in speech [ 11 ], even though its variations have been discussed in many contexts [ 12 , 13 , 14 ]. Herdan’s law.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic Laws in Speech: The Case of Catalan and Spanish

Hernández-Fernández

Torre

Almiñana

et al. 2019

Entropy

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In this work we consider Glissando Corpus—an oral corpus of Catalan and Spanish—and empirically analyze the presence of the four classical linguistic laws (Zipf’s law, Herdan’s law, Brevity law, and Menzerath–Altmann’s law) in oral communication, and further complement this with the analysis of two recently formulated laws: lognormality law and size-rank law. By aligning the acoustic signal of speech production with the speech transcriptions, we are able to measure and compare the agreement of each of these laws when measured in both physical and symbolic units. Our results show that these six laws are recovered in both languages but considerably more emphatically so when these are examined in physical units, hence reinforcing the so-called ‘physical hypothesis’ according to which linguistic laws might indeed have a physical origin and the patterns recovered in written texts would, therefore, be just a byproduct of the regularities already present in the acoustic signals of oral communication.

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“…The number of studies that have put Zipf's law to the test for spoken dialog is limited, especially compared with the vast number of studies that make use of written monolog. There are some notable exceptions (Baixeries et al, 2013;Bian et al, 2016;Hernández-Fernández et al, 2019;Lin et al, 2015;Neophytou et al, 2017;Ridley, 1982 ;Torre et al, 2019). However, these exceptions generally make use of a small language corpus of data (Ridley, 1982;Torre et al, 2019), focus on a specific group of speakers (Baixeries et al, 2013;Neophytou et al, 2017), or use heterogenous data where speech was taken from a variety of settings (Bian et al, 2016;Hernández-Fernández et al, 2019;Lin et al, 2015).…”

Section: Spoken Dialogmentioning

confidence: 99%

Zipf’s law revisited: Spoken dialog, linguistic units, parameters, and the principle of least effort

Linders

Louwerse

2022

Psychon Bull Rev

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The ubiquitous inverse relationship between word frequency and word rank is commonly known as Zipf’s law. The theoretical underpinning of this law states that the inverse relationship yields decreased effort in both the speaker and hearer, the so-called principle of least effort. Most research has focused on showing an inverse relationship only for written monolog, only for frequencies and ranks of one linguistic unit, generally word unigrams, with strong correlations of the power law to the observed frequency distributions, with limited to no attention to psychological mechanisms such as the principle of least effort. The current paper extends the existing findings, by not focusing on written monolog but on a more fundamental form of communication, spoken dialog, by not only investigating word unigrams but also units quantified on syntactic, pragmatic, utterance, and nonverbal communicative levels by showing that the adequacy of Zipf’s formula seems ubiquitous, but the exponent of the power law curve is not, and by placing these findings in the context of Zipf’s principle of least effort through redefining effort in terms of cognitive resources available for communication. Our findings show that Zipf’s law also applies to a more natural form of communication—that of spoken dialog, that it applies to a range of linguistic units beyond word unigrams, that the general good fit of Zipf’s law needs to be revisited in light of the parameters of the formula, and that the principle of least effort is a useful theoretical framework for the findings of Zipf’s law.

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Zipf's Law in Aphasia Across Languages: A Comparison of English, Hungarian and Greek

Cited by 8 publications

References 16 publications

On the physical origin of linguistic laws and lognormality in speech

On the physical origin of linguistic laws and lognormality in speech

Linguistic Laws in Speech: The Case of Catalan and Spanish

Zipf’s law revisited: Spoken dialog, linguistic units, parameters, and the principle of least effort

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