A word of a natural language has 2.718 different meanings or slightly more

The capacity of lexical decision-making in the brain conforms to the indefiniteness latent in natural languages. The average number of different meanings per word of a natural language is measured to be 2.805 +/- 0.005 irrespective of whether the language is Chinese, English or Japanese. If one can almost perfectly comprehend words and sentences written in a natural language in a context-dependent manner, the average number of different meanings per word would reduce to e (= 2.718281828459...), the base of natural or Napierian logarithms.     

The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books

We report here trends in the usage of “mood” words, that is, words carrying emotional content, in 20th century English language books, using the data set provided by Google that includes word frequencies in roughly 4% of all books published up to the year 2008. We find evidence for distinct historical periods of positive and negative moods, underlain by a general decrease in the use of emotion-related words through time. Finally, we show that, in books, American English has become decidedly more “emotional” than British English in the last half-century, as a part of a more general increase of the stylistic divergence between the two variants of English language.     

Beyond Word Frequency: Bursts,Lulls, and Scaling in the Temporal Distributions of Words

Background

Zipf''s discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication. More recent research has also identified scaling regularities in the dynamics underlying the successive occurrences of events, suggesting the possibility of similar findings for language as well.

Methodology/Principal Findings

By considering frequent words in USENET discussion groups and in disparate databases where the language has different levels of formality, here we show that the distributions of distances between successive occurrences of the same word display bursty deviations from a Poisson process and are well characterized by a stretched exponential (Weibull) scaling. The extent of this deviation depends strongly on semantic type – a measure of the logicality of each word – and less strongly on frequency. We develop a generative model of this behavior that fully determines the dynamics of word usage.

Conclusions/Significance

Recurrence patterns of words are well described by a stretched exponential distribution of recurrence times, an empirical scaling that cannot be anticipated from Zipf''s law. Because the use of words provides a uniquely precise and powerful lens on human thought and activity, our findings also have implications for other overt manifestations of collective human dynamics.     

What is an "organism"? On the occurrence of a new term and its conceptual transformations 1680-1850

The essay reconstructs the occurrence of the term "organism" and the transformations of its concept from around 1680 to the middle of the nineteenth century. The different sections refer to individual authors who used the word "organism" and situate its usage in specific historical contexts. After earlier uses of the word in medieval sources, the Latin word "organismus" appeared in 1684 in Stahl's medico-physiological writings. Around 1700, it can be found in French (organisme), English (organism), Italian (organismo) and later also in German (Organismus). During the eighteenth century, the word "organism" generally referred to a specific principle or form of order, often in opposition to the order of "mechanism," that could be applied to plants, animals or the entire world. At the end of the eighteenth century, the term became a generic name for individual living entities with inside-outside-interfaces and an inner "organization" of parts. From around 1830, the word "organism" replaced the expressions "organic" or "organized body" as a recurrent technical term in the emerging biological disciplines.     

Language as an evolving word web.

Human language may be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and interacting words in sentences are connected by edges. The empirical distribution of the number of connections of words in this network is of a peculiar form that includes two pronounced power-law regions. Here we propose a theory of the evolution of language, which treats language as a self-organizing network of interacting words. In the framework of this concept, we completely describe the observed word web structure without any fitting. We show that the two regimes in the distribution naturally emerge from the evolutionary dynamics of the word web. It follows from our theory that the size of the core part of language, the 'kernel lexicon', does not vary as language evolves.     

Ignoring non‐English‐language studies may bias ecological meta‐analyses

Meta‐analysis plays a crucial role in syntheses of quantitative evidence in ecology and biodiversity conservation. The reliability of estimates in meta‐analyses strongly depends on unbiased sampling of primary studies. Although earlier studies have explored potential biases in ecological meta‐analyses, biases in reported statistical results and associated study characteristics published in different languages have never been tested in environmental sciences. We address this knowledge gap by systematically searching published meta‐analyses and comparing effect‐size estimates between English‐ and Japanese‐language studies included in existing meta‐analyses. Of the 40 published ecological meta‐analysis articles authored by those affiliated to Japanese institutions, we find that three meta‐analysis articles searched for studies in the two languages and involved sufficient numbers of English‐ and Japanese‐language studies, resulting in four eligible meta‐analyses (i.e., four meta‐analyses conducted in the three meta‐analysis articles). In two of the four, effect sizes differ significantly between the English‐ and Japanese‐language studies included in the meta‐analyses, causing considerable changes in overall mean effect sizes and even their direction when Japanese‐language studies are excluded. The observed differences in effect sizes are likely attributable to systematic differences in reported statistical results and associated study characteristics, particularly taxa and ecosystems, between English‐ and Japanese‐language studies. Despite being based on a small sample size, our findings suggest that ignoring non‐English‐language studies may bias outcomes of ecological meta‐analyses, due to systematic differences in study characteristics and effect‐size estimates between English‐ and non‐English languages. We provide a list of actions that meta‐analysts could take in the future to reduce the risk of language bias.     

SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese Word and Character Frequencies Based on Film Subtitles

Background

Word frequency is the most important variable in language research. However, despite the growing interest in the Chinese language, there are only a few sources of word frequency measures available to researchers, and the quality is less than what researchers in other languages are used to.

Methodology

Following recent work by New, Brysbaert, and colleagues in English, French and Dutch, we assembled a database of word and character frequencies based on a corpus of film and television subtitles (46.8 million characters, 33.5 million words). In line with what has been found in the other languages, the new word and character frequencies explain significantly more of the variance in Chinese word naming and lexical decision performance than measures based on written texts.

Conclusions

Our results confirm that word frequencies based on subtitles are a good estimate of daily language exposure and capture much of the variance in word processing efficiency. In addition, our database is the first to include information about the contextual diversity of the words and to provide good frequency estimates for multi-character words and the different syntactic roles in which the words are used. The word frequencies are freely available for research purposes.     

Protein Languages Differ Depending on Microorganism Lifestyle

Few quantitative measures of genome architecture or organization exist to support assumptions of differences between microorganisms that are broadly defined as being free-living or pathogenic. General principles about complete proteomes exist for codon usage, amino acid biases and essential or core genes. Genome-wide shifts in amino acid usage between free-living and pathogenic microorganisms result in fundamental differences in the complexity of their respective proteomes that are size and gene content independent. These differences are evident across broad phylogenetic groups–a result of environmental factors and population genetic forces rather than phylogenetic distance. A novel comparative analysis of amino acid usage–utilizing linguistic analyses of word frequency in language and text–identified a global pattern of higher peptide word repetition in 376 free-living versus 421 pathogen genomes across broad ranges of genome size, G+C content and phylogenetic ancestry. This imprint of repetitive word usage indicates free-living microorganisms have a bias for repetitive sequence usage compared to pathogens. These findings quantify fundamental differences in microbial genomes relative to life-history function.     

Word Decoding of Protein Amino Acid Sequences with Availability Analysis: A Linguistic Approach

The amino acid sequences of proteins determine their three-dimensional structures and functions. However, how sequence information is related to structures and functions is still enigmatic. In this study, we show that at least a part of the sequence information can be extracted by treating amino acid sequences of proteins as a collection of English words, based on a working hypothesis that amino acid sequences of proteins are composed of short constituent amino acid sequences (SCSs) or “words”. We first confirmed that the English language highly likely follows Zipf''s law, a special case of power law. We found that the rank-frequency plot of SCSs in proteins exhibits a similar distribution when low-rank tails are excluded. In comparison with natural English and “compressed” English without spaces between words, amino acid sequences of proteins show larger linear ranges and smaller exponents with heavier low-rank tails, demonstrating that the SCS distribution in proteins is largely scale-free. A distribution pattern of SCSs in proteins is similar among species, but species-specific features are also present. Based on the availability scores of SCSs, we found that sequence motifs are enriched in high-availability sites (i.e., “key words”) and vice versa. In fact, the highest availability peak within a given protein sequence often directly corresponds to a sequence motif. The amino acid composition of high-availability sites within motifs is different from that of entire motifs and all protein sequences, suggesting the possible functional importance of specific SCSs and their compositional amino acids within motifs. We anticipate that our availability-based word decoding approach is complementary to sequence alignment approaches in predicting functionally important sites of unknown proteins from their amino acid sequences.     

Fingerspelling as a Novel Gateway into Reading Fluency in Deaf Bilinguals

Studies have shown that American Sign Language (ASL) fluency has a positive impact on deaf individuals’ English reading, but the cognitive and cross-linguistic mechanisms permitting the mapping of a visual-manual language onto a sound-based language have yet to be elucidated. Fingerspelling, which represents English orthography with 26 distinct hand configurations, is an integral part of ASL and has been suggested to provide deaf bilinguals with important cross-linguistic links between sign language and orthography. Using a hierarchical multiple regression analysis, this study examined the relationship of age of ASL exposure, ASL fluency, and fingerspelling skill on reading fluency in deaf college-age bilinguals. After controlling for ASL fluency, fingerspelling skill significantly predicted reading fluency, revealing for the first-time that fingerspelling, above and beyond ASL skills, contributes to reading fluency in deaf bilinguals. We suggest that both fingerspelling—in the visual-manual modality—and reading—in the visual-orthographic modality—are mutually facilitating because they share common underlying cognitive capacities of word decoding accuracy and automaticity of word recognition. The findings provide support for the hypothesis that the development of English reading proficiency may be facilitated through strengthening of the relationship among fingerspelling, sign language, and orthographic decoding en route to reading mastery, and may also reveal optimal approaches for reading instruction for deaf and hard of hearing children.     

Positivity of the English language

Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.     

The morphome in constructive and abstractive models of morphology

Although the definition and usage of the term ‘morphome’ differs in the academic literature, the original definition of a morphome by Aronoff (1994) is that it is a function which determines the distribution of form within the inflectional paradigm and beyond. More importantly, however, morphomes suppose the existence of what Aronoff terms ‘a morphomic level’ which embodies an empirical claim about the structure of language: ‘the mapping from morphosyntax to phonological realization is not direct but passes through an intermediate level’ (Aronoff in Morphology by itself, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994:25). This is a strong claim concerning all types of morphological exponence. In this article, after an analysis of Aronoff’s model of morphology, I draw upon the distinction which Blevins (J. Linguist. 42:531–573, 2006) makes between constructive and abstractive models of morphology. I note that the introduction of a morphomic level merely constitutes an incorporation of a partial paradigmatic dimension into a constructive model of morphology. With reference to a semantically and phonologically unmotivated distribution of allomorphy in Romance I argue that although the introduction of the morphomic level is beneficial, since it can formalise systematic and ‘psychologically real’ homonymies in synchronic grammars in a way which is not merely coincidental, a constructive morphomic theory of morphology does not present significant advantages over abstractive theories as regards the formalisation of the synchronic facts and presents disadvantages as regards the motivation of diachronic tendencies which this particular distribution of allomorphy shows cross-linguistically. I argue that these historical tendencies support a more paradigmatic theory of morphology inherent in abstractive models, which consider the word as the basic unit of analysis and word formation a matter of analogical deduction based on the predictable capacity of stored exemplar paradigms and principal parts.     

Word Formation Is Aware of Morpheme Family Size

Words are built from smaller meaning bearing parts, called morphemes. As one word can contain multiple morphemes, one morpheme can be present in different words. The number of distinct words a morpheme can be found in is its family size. Here we used Birth-Death-Innovation Models (BDIMs) to analyze the distribution of morpheme family sizes in English and German vocabulary over the last 200 years. Rather than just fitting to a probability distribution, these mechanistic models allow for the direct interpretation of identified parameters. Despite the complexity of language change, we indeed found that a specific variant of this pure stochastic model, the second order linear balanced BDIM, significantly fitted the observed distributions. In this model, birth and death rates are increased for smaller morpheme families. This finding indicates an influence of morpheme family sizes on vocabulary changes. This could be an effect of word formation, perception or both. On a more general level, we give an example on how mechanistic models can enable the identification of statistical trends in language change usually hidden by cultural influences.     

Language and imagery: effects of language modality

Across spoken languages, properties of wordforms (e.g. the sounds in the word hammer) do not generally evoke mental images associated to meanings. However, across signed languages, many signforms readily evoke mental images (e.g. the sign HAMMER resembles the motion involved in hammering). Here we assess the relationship between language and imagery, comparing the performance of English speakers and British sign language (BSL) signers in meaning similarity judgement tasks. In experiment 1, we found that BSL signers used these imagistic properties in making meaning similarity judgements, in contrast with English speakers. In experiment 2, we found that English speakers behaved more like BSL signers when asked to develop mental images for the words before performing the same task. These findings show that language differences can bias users to attend more to those aspects of the world encoded in their language than to those that are not; and that language modality (spoken versus signed) can affect the degree to which imagery is involved in language.     

Bilingualism Accentuates Children's Conversational Understanding

Background

Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences children''s conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3–6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the children''s ability to identify responses to questions as violations of conversational maxims (to be informative and avoid redundancy, to speak the truth, be relevant, and be polite).

Principal Findings

In Experiment 1, with increasing age, children showed greater sensitivity to maxim violations. Children in Italy who were bilingual in German and Italian (with German as the dominant language L1) significantly outperformed Italian monolinguals. In Experiment 2, children in England who were bilingual in English and Japanese (with English as L1) significantly outperformed Japanese monolinguals in Japan with vocabulary age partialled out.

Conclusions

As the monolingual and bilingual groups had a similar family SES background (Experiment 1) and similar family cultural identity (Experiment 2), these results point to a specific role for early bilingualism in accentuating children''s developing ability to appreciate effective communicative responses.     

Bilingual beginnings to learning words

At the macrostructure level of language milestones, language acquisition follows a nearly identical course whether children grow up with one or with two languages. However, at the microstructure level, experimental research is revealing that the same proclivities and learning mechanisms that support language acquisition unfold somewhat differently in bilingual versus monolingual environments. This paper synthesizes recent findings in the area of early bilingualism by focusing on the question of how bilingual infants come to apply their phonetic sensitivities to word learning, as they must to learn minimal pair words (e.g. ‘cat’ and ‘mat’). To this end, the paper reviews antecedent achievements by bilinguals throughout infancy and early childhood in the following areas: language discrimination and separation, speech perception, phonetic and phonotactic development, word recognition, word learning and aspects of conceptual development that underlie word learning. Special consideration is given to the role of language dominance, and to the unique challenges to language acquisition posed by a bilingual environment.     

Stress “Deafness” Reveals Absence of Lexical Marking of Stress or Tone in the Adult Grammar

A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress “deafness” is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite earlier claims that this should have an effect. This finding is of significance for speech processing, language acquisition and phonological theory.     

When Small Words Foretell Academic Success: The Case of College Admissions Essays

The smallest and most commonly used words in English are pronouns, articles, and other function words. Almost invisible to the reader or writer, function words can reveal ways people think and approach topics. A computerized text analysis of over 50,000 college admissions essays from more than 25,000 entering students found a coherent dimension of language use based on eight standard function word categories. The dimension, which reflected the degree students used categorical versus dynamic language, was analyzed to track college grades over students'' four years of college. Higher grades were associated with greater article and preposition use, indicating categorical language (i.e., references to complexly organized objects and concepts). Lower grades were associated with greater use of auxiliary verbs, pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, and negations, indicating more dynamic language (i.e., personal narratives). The links between the categorical-dynamic index (CDI) and academic performance hint at the cognitive styles rewarded by higher education institutions.