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How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech

Does systematic covariation in the usage patterns of forms shape the sublexical variance observed in conversational speech? We address this question in terms of a recently proposed discriminative theory of human communication that argues that the distribution of events in communicative contexts shou...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Linke, Maja, Ramscar, Michael
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7516525/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33285865
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22010090
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author Linke, Maja
Ramscar, Michael
author_facet Linke, Maja
Ramscar, Michael
author_sort Linke, Maja
collection PubMed
description Does systematic covariation in the usage patterns of forms shape the sublexical variance observed in conversational speech? We address this question in terms of a recently proposed discriminative theory of human communication that argues that the distribution of events in communicative contexts should maintain mutual predictability between language users, present evidence that the distributions of words in the empirical contexts in which they are learned and used are geometric, and thus support this. Here, we extend this analysis to a corpus of conversational English, showing that the distribution of grammatical regularities and the sub-distributions of tokens discriminated by them are also geometric. Further analyses reveal a range of structural differences in the distribution of types in parts of speech categories that further support the suggestion that linguistic distributions (and codes) are subcategorized by context at multiple levels of abstraction. Finally, a series of analyses of the variation in spoken language reveals that quantifiable differences in the structure of lexical subcategories appears in turn to systematically shape sublexical variation in speech signal.
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spelling pubmed-75165252020-11-09 How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech Linke, Maja Ramscar, Michael Entropy (Basel) Article Does systematic covariation in the usage patterns of forms shape the sublexical variance observed in conversational speech? We address this question in terms of a recently proposed discriminative theory of human communication that argues that the distribution of events in communicative contexts should maintain mutual predictability between language users, present evidence that the distributions of words in the empirical contexts in which they are learned and used are geometric, and thus support this. Here, we extend this analysis to a corpus of conversational English, showing that the distribution of grammatical regularities and the sub-distributions of tokens discriminated by them are also geometric. Further analyses reveal a range of structural differences in the distribution of types in parts of speech categories that further support the suggestion that linguistic distributions (and codes) are subcategorized by context at multiple levels of abstraction. Finally, a series of analyses of the variation in spoken language reveals that quantifiable differences in the structure of lexical subcategories appears in turn to systematically shape sublexical variation in speech signal. MDPI 2020-01-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7516525/ /pubmed/33285865 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22010090 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Linke, Maja
Ramscar, Michael
How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech
title How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech
title_full How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech
title_fullStr How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech
title_full_unstemmed How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech
title_short How the Probabilistic Structure of Grammatical Context Shapes Speech
title_sort how the probabilistic structure of grammatical context shapes speech
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7516525/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33285865
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e22010090
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