Linguistic laws in speech: The case of Catalan and Spanish

Cita com:
hdl:2117/329665
Document typePart of book or chapter of book
Defense date2020-08
PublisherMDPI
Rights accessOpen Access
Except where otherwise noted, content on this work
is licensed under a Creative Commons license
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Attribution 3.0 Spain
Abstract
In this work we consider Glissando Corpus—an oral corpus of Catalan and Spanish—and empirically analyze the presence of the four classical linguistic laws (Zipf’s law, Herdan’s law, Brevity law, and Menzerath–Altmann’s law) in oral communication, and further complement this with the analysis of two recently formulated laws: lognormality law and size-rank law. By aligning the acoustic signal of speech production with the speech transcriptions, we are able to measure and compare the agreement of each of these laws when measured in both physical and symbolic units. Our results show that these six laws are recovered in both languages but considerably more emphatically so when these are examined in physical units, hence reinforcing the so-called ‘physical hypothesis’ according to which linguistic laws might indeed have a physical origin and the patterns recovered in written texts would, therefore, be just a byproduct of the regularities already present in the acoustic signals of oral communication.
Description
This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300) from 2019 to 2020 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy/specialissues/inf theory Lang).
CitationHernández Fernández, A. [et al.]. Linguistic laws in speech: The case of Catalan and Spanish. A: "Information theory and language". Basel: MDPI, 2020, p. 173-188.
ISBN978-3-03936-026-0
Publisher versionhttps://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/2614
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