Statistical Mechanical Approach to Human Language
arXiv:physics/0510019 · doi:10.1016/j.physa.2005.10.039
Abstract
We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are able to explain several characteristic features of human language that seem completely unrelated, such as the universality of the Zipf exponent, the vocabulary size of children, the reduced communication abilities of people suffering from schizophrenia, etc. While several explanations are necessarily only qualitative at this stage, we have, nevertheless, been able to derive a formula for the vocabulary size of children as a function of age, which agrees rather well with experimental data.
20 pages,4 figures, Accepted in Physica A
References in corpus (7)
- Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
- Interlinguistic similarity and language death dynamics
- Microscopic and Macroscopic Simulation of Competition between Languages
- Language evolution and population Dynamics in a system of two interacting species
- Simulation for competition of languages with an ageing sexual population
- Competition of Languages and their Hamming Distance
- Phase transition in a sexual age-structured model of learning foreign languages
Cited by in corpus (13)
- Positive words carry less information than negative words
- Maximum entropy principle and power-law tailed distributions
- Microscopic Abrams-Strogatz model of language competition
- Evolution of Vocabulary on Scale-free and Random Networks
- Application of a Quantum Ensemble Model to Linguistic Analysis
- Parameters of the Menzerath-Altmann law: Statistical mechanical interpretation as applied to a linguistic organization
- Statistical mechanics of ontology based annotations
- Hubs in Languages: Scale Free Networks of Synonyms
- Information entropy and temperature of the binary Markov chains
- A Random Matrix Approach to Language Acquisition
- Approaches to the classification of complex systems: Words, texts, and more
- Understanding Zipf's law of word frequencies through sample-space collapse in sentence formation
- Diversity, competition, extinction: the ecophysics of language change