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Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language
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Language as an evolving word web.

S N Dorogovtsev1, J F Mendes

  • 1Departamento de Física and Centro de Física do Porto, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre 687, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal. sdorogov@fc.up.pt

Proceedings. Biological Sciences
|December 26, 2001
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Language evolves as a self-organizing word network. This study explains the observed network structure and shows the core lexicon size remains constant during language evolution.

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Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Network Science
  • Computational Linguistics

Background:

  • Human language can be modeled as a complex network where words are nodes and their interactions are edges.
  • The distribution of word connections in this network exhibits a unique structure with two power-law regions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose a theory for language evolution based on self-organizing networks.
  • To explain the observed word web structure and its power-law distributions without fitting parameters.
  • To investigate the dynamics of the core lexicon during language evolution.

Main Methods:

  • Modeling language as a self-organizing network of interacting words.
  • Analyzing the evolutionary dynamics of the word web structure.
  • Describing the emergent properties of the network without empirical fitting.

Main Results:

  • The proposed theory completely describes the observed word web structure.
  • The two distinct power-law regimes in the word connection distribution naturally emerge from the evolutionary dynamics.
  • The size of the kernel lexicon remains invariant throughout language evolution.

Conclusions:

  • Language evolution can be understood through the lens of self-organizing networks.
  • The structure of language networks is an emergent property of word interaction dynamics.
  • The core vocabulary of a language is a stable feature resistant to evolutionary changes.