Language statistics as a window into mental representations.

ABSTRACT: Large-scale linguistic data is nowadays available in abundance. Using this source of data, previous research has identified redundancies between the statistical structure of natural language and properties of the (physical) world we live in. For example, it has been shown that we can gauge city sizes by analyzing their respective word frequencies in corpora. However, since natural language is always produced by human speakers, we point out that such redundancies can only come about indirectly and should necessarily be restricted cases where human representations largely retain characteristics of the physical world. To demonstrate this, we examine the statistical occurrence of words referring to body parts in very different languages, covering nearly 4 billions of native speakers. This is b

SUBMITTER: Gunther F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9110419 | biostudies-literature | 2022 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature