ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2022
Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Measuring hierarchical structure across hominid percussive tool-use sequences.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Behavioral sequences across multiple animal species in the wild share common structural features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Nonadjacent dependencies and sequential structure of chimpanzee action during a natural tool-use task.PeerJ · 2024Article
- Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Toward a Computational Neuroethology of Vocal Communication: From Bioacoustics to Neurophysiology, Emerging Tools and Future Directions.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
To convey meaning, human language relies on hierarchically organized, long-range relationships spanning words, phrases, sentences and discourse. As the distances between elements (e.g. phonemes, characters, words) in human language sequences increase, the strength of the long-range relationships between those elements decays following a power law. This power-law relationship has been attributed variously to long-range sequential organization present in human language syntax, semantics and discourse structure. However, non-linguistic behaviours in numerous phylogenetically distant species, ranging from humpback whale song to fruit fly motility, also demonstrate similar long-range statistical dependencies. Therefore, we hypothesized that long-range statistical dependencies in human speech may occur independently of linguistic structure. To test this hypothesis, we measured long-range dependencies in several speech corpora from children (aged 6 months-12 years). We find that adult-like power-law statistical dependencies are present in human vocalizations at the earliest detectable ages, prior to the production of complex linguistic structure. These linguistic structures cannot, therefore, be the sole cause of long-range statistical dependencies in language.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.