Modern machine learning has subverted and bypassed the theoretical framework of
Chomsky's generative approach to linguistics, including its core claims to particular insights …

The prevalence of redundancy in the world languages has long puzzled language
researchers. It is especially surprising in light of the growing evidence on speakers' …

Music and spoken language share certain characteristics: both consist of sequences of
acoustic elements that are combinatorically combined, and these elements partition the …

The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages.
While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of …

Abstract Words and the concepts they represent vary across languages. Here we ask if
mother-tongue concepts are altered by learning a second language. What happens when …

Based on a dataset representing close to ¾ of the world's languages we investigate
differences among languages and between items on the Swadesh list with regard to mean …

Spelling-to-sound translation in English is particularly complex for vowels. For example, the
pronunciations of‹ a› include the long vowel of‹ paper› and‹ sacred› and the short vowel of‹ …

In the realm of linguistics, the concept of “semanticity” was recently introduced as a novel
measure designed to study linguistic networks. In a given text, semanticity is defined as the …

There is growing evidence that cognitive biases play a role in shaping language structure.
Here, we ask whether such biases could contribute to the propensity of Zipfian word …

A substantial body of work has provided evidence that the lexicons of natural languages are
organized to support efficient communication. However, existing work has largely focused …