On the physical origin of linguistic laws and lognormality in speech.

ABSTRACT: Physical manifestations of linguistic units include sources of variability due to factors of speech production which are by definition excluded from counts of linguistic symbols. In this work, we examine whether linguistic laws hold with respect to the physical manifestations of linguistic units in spoken English. The data we analyse come from a phonetically transcribed database of acoustic recordings of spontaneous speech known as the Buckeye Speech corpus. First, we verify with unprecedented accuracy that acoustically transcribed durations of linguistic units at several scales comply with a lognormal distribution, and we quantitatively justify this 'lognormality law' using a stochastic generative model. Second, we explore the four classical linguistic laws (Zipf's Law, Herdan's Law, Brev

SUBMITTER: Torre IG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6731709 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature