18 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Guangyuan Jiang, Matthias Hofer, Jiayuan Mao, Lionel Wong + 2 more
'Joshua B. Tenenbaum' 'Roger Lévy'] One hallmark of human language is its combinatoriality reusing a relatively small inventory of building blocks to create a far larger inventory of increasingly complex structures. In this paper, we explore the idea that combinatoriality in language reflects a human inductive bias…
Simon J. Han, Piers Kelly, James Winters, Charles Kemp
Linguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than half…
Leyi Qian, Yan Cheng, Yali Zhao
In studies on second language writing, linguistic complexity exhibited by learners has long been regarded as being indicative of writing proficiency. However, there are relatively scant studies focusing on the diversity and structural elaboration of complexity in L2 production data that are extracted from high-stakes…
Alexander Porto, Nikolai Huckle, Alexander Basalyga, Julio Santiago + 1 more
'Alexander Kranjec'] Writing systems are an underused source of stimuli for behavioral and computational experiments in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and anthropology, despite being ecologically relevant and systematically different in shape, structure, and orientation. One possible reason that glyphs of…
Faris H. R. Awadh, Rachel Zoubrinetzky, Ahmed Zaher, Sylviane Valdois
'Sylviane Valdois'] Introduction Visual attention span is a measure of multielement parallel processing. Individuals with higher visual attention span are expected to allocate more attention to letters within strings, which boosts letter identification and translates into more efficient reading. Given the high visual…
G. V. Bency Sherin, A. Abijesh Euphrine, A. Lenora Moreen, Laurence José
'Laurence José'] UniGlyph represents a groundbreaking venture into the realm of constructed languages (conlangs), aiming to establish a universal transliteration system using a script derived from seven-segment characters. Its core objective is to foster cross-language communication through the provision of a flexible…
Xenia Schmalz, Jay G. Rueckl, Noam Siegelman
Cross-linguistic reading research often focuses on the effect of orthographic depth-the closeness of the relationship between print and speech. To understand its effect on reading, we need to be able to objectively quantify the level of orthographic depth of a given orthography. Previous work has suggested that…
Alaa Ghandour, Emmanuel Trouche, Dominique Guillo, Sylviane Valdois
The present study sets out to explore the cognitive underpinnings of reading acquisition in Arabic. Previous studies have identified phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming as early predictors. However, the graphic complexity of Arabic letters imposes particular constraints on the visual system, which…
Hiroki Fukui
Writing systems are cultural replicators whose evolution has never been studied quantitatively at global scale. We compile the Global Script Database (GSD): 300 writing and notation systems, 50 binary structural characters, and 259 phylogenetic edges spanning 5,400 years. Applying four methods -- phenetics, cladistics…
Chihiro Taguchi, David Chiang
Complexity Hurts, Phonological Complexity Doesn't Authors: ['Chihiro Taguchi' 'David Chiang'] We investigate what linguistic factors affect the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models. We hypothesize that orthographic and phonological complexities both degrade accuracy. To examine this, we finetune the…
Stanisław Drożdż
The science of complexity aims to answer the question of what rules nature chooses when assembling the basic constituents of matter and energy into structures and dynamical patterns that cascade through the entire hierarchy of scales in the Universe. A related phenomenon – natural language – can successfully mirror…
Richard Apodaca
Despite its widespread use, Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System (SMILES) remains underspecified. The lack of a detailed specification encourages improvisation by software developers, complicates data standardization efforts, and undermines extension development. Balsa, a reformulation of SMILES, addresses…
Hana Jee, Jinhwan Kwon
Recent studies have revealed that writing systems exhibit systematic relationships between letter shapes and their corresponding sounds, termed ‘grapho-phonemic systematicity’. This systematicity manifests differently across writing systems: Semitic languages maximize systematicity through pixel count, Chinese through…
Ting Sophia Xu, Lawrence Jun Zhang
Based on Kellogg’s writing model, Skehan’s Limited Attentional Capacity Model (LACM), and Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis, our study investigated the effects of cognitive task complexity on syntactic complexity, lexical complexity, accuracy, fluency, and functional adequacy in Chinese L2 students’ argumentative…
Swarnendu Moitra, Dustin A. Chacón, Linnaea Stockall
This paper presents a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study on reading in Bangla, an east Indo-Aryan language predominantly written in an abugida script. The study aims to uncover how visual stimuli are processed and mapped onto abstract linguistic representations in the brain. Specifically, we investigate the neural…
Carlo Y. Meloni, Jessica K. Ivani, Taras Zakharko, Guanghao You + 2 more
The acquisition of writing has a lasting effect on how languages are processed in the brain, raising the possibility that it also affects how they are used and evolve over time. A popular hypothesis is that writing specifically leads to increased use and evolution of complex hierarchical structures in language. While…
Junyi Zhou, Rui Liu, Pengyu Liu, Yu Liu
We introduce the ladderpath index as a measure of language complexity grounded in algorithmic information theory. It counts the minimum steps needed to reconstruct a sequence through hierarchical reuse of repeated substructures, capturing an exactly computable but constrained form of algorithmic compressibility related…
Shujie Geng, Wanwan Guo, Kunyu Xu, Tianye Jia + 5 more
Word reading includes a series of cognitive processes that convert low-level visual characteristics to neural representations. However, the consistency of the neural mechanisms for processing these cognitive components across different writing systems in bilinguals remains inconclusive. Here, we explored this question…