ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
On the physical origin of linguistic laws and lognormality in speech.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Zebra finches transform manipulated songs with shuffled syllables to exhibit linguistic laws.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Investigating Menzerath's law in crows and humans during cued vocal 'counting'.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Does Zipf's law of abbreviation shape birdsong?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Vocal efficiency in crows.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency in whale communication.Science advances · 2025Article
- Zipf's law in China's local government work reports: A 21-year study using natural language processing and regression analysis.PloS one · 2025Article
- Signers and Speakers Show Distinct Temporal Kinematic Signatures in Their Manual Communicative Movements.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Inter-call intervals, but not call durations, adhere to Menzerath's Law in the submissive vocal bouts of meerkats.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Word Length in Political Public Speaking: Distribution and Time Evolution.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Spot the bot: the inverse problems of NLP.PeerJ. Computer science · 2024Article
- Linguistic law-like compression strategies emerge to maximize coding efficiency in marmoset vocal communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Zipf's law revisited: Spoken dialog, linguistic units, parameters, and the principle of least effort.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Review
- Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Article
- Linguistic laws in biology.Trends in ecology & evolution · 2022Review
- Quantifiers in Natural Language: Efficient Communication and Degrees of Semantic Universals.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Principle of Least Effort and Sentence Length in Public Speaking.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Menzerath-Altmann's Law of Syntax in RNA Accretion History.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Menzerath's Law in the Syntax of Languages Compared with Random Sentences.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Article
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5 authors.
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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, Brevity Law and Menzerath-Altmann's Law (MAL)) in oral communication, both in physical units and in symbolic units measured in the speech transcriptions, and find that the validity of these laws is typically stronger when using physical units than in their symbolic counterpart. Additional results include (i) coining a Herdan's Law in physical units, (ii) a precise mathematical formulation of Brevity Law, which we show to be connected to optimal compression principles in information theory and allows to formulate and validate yet another law which we call the size-rank law or (iii) a mathematical derivation of MAL which also highlights an additional regime where the law is inverted. Altogether, these results support the hypothesis that statistical laws in language have a physical origin.
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