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Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers
Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphologi...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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The Royal Society
2019
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6408393/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30891265 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181274 |
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author | Koplenig, Alexander |
author_facet | Koplenig, Alexander |
author_sort | Koplenig, Alexander |
collection | PubMed |
description | Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6408393 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-64083932019-03-19 Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers Koplenig, Alexander R Soc Open Sci Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Large-scale empirical evidence indicates a fascinating statistical relationship between the estimated number of language users and its linguistic and statistical structure. In this context, the linguistic niche hypothesis argues that this relationship reflects a negative selection against morphological paradigms that are hard to learn for adults, because languages with a large number of speakers are assumed to be typically spoken and learned by greater proportions of adults. In this paper, this conjecture is tested empirically for more than 2000 languages. The results question the idea of the impact of non-native speakers on the grammatical and statistical structure of languages, as it is demonstrated that the relative proportion of non-native speakers does not significantly correlate with either morphological or information-theoretic complexity. While it thus seems that large numbers of adult learners/speakers do not affect the (grammatical or statistical) structure of a language, the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between the number of speakers and (especially) information-theoretic complexity, i.e. entropy rates. A potential explanation for the observed relationship is discussed. The Royal Society 2019-02-27 /pmc/articles/PMC6408393/ /pubmed/30891265 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181274 Text en © 2019 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Koplenig, Alexander Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers |
title | Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers |
title_full | Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers |
title_fullStr | Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers |
title_full_unstemmed | Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers |
title_short | Language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers |
title_sort | language structure is influenced by the number of speakers but seemingly not by the proportion of non-native speakers |
topic | Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6408393/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30891265 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181274 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT koplenigalexander languagestructureisinfluencedbythenumberofspeakersbutseeminglynotbytheproportionofnonnativespeakers |