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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...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2020
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7516525 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT linkemaja howtheprobabilisticstructureofgrammaticalcontextshapesspeech AT ramscarmichael howtheprobabilisticstructureofgrammaticalcontextshapesspeech |