ArticleEntropy (Basel, Switzerland)2024
Still No Evidence for an Effect of the Proportion of Non-Native Speakers on Natural Language Complexity.
Article in Entropy (Basel, Switzerland), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- An inverse correlation between structural linguistic and human genetic diversity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Contact and complexity in English varieties: The influence of speaker numbers on syntheticity and grammaticity.PloS one · 2026Article
- Assessing the Role of Socio-Demographic Triggers on Kolmogorov-Based Complexity in Spoken English Varieties.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Macroevolutionary analysis of polysynthesis shows that language complexity is more likely to evolve in small, isolated populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
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Abstract
In a recent study, I demonstrated that large numbers of L2 (second language) speakers do not appear to influence the morphological or information-theoretic complexity of natural languages. This paper has three primary aims: First, I address recent criticisms of my analyses, showing that the points raised by my critics were already explicitly considered and analysed in my original work. Furthermore, I show that the proposed alternative analyses fail to withstand detailed examination. Second, I introduce new data on the information-theoretic complexity of natural languages, with the estimates derived from various language models-ranging from simple statistical models to advanced neural networks-based on a database of 40 multilingual text collections that represent a wide range of text types. Third, I re-analyse the information-theoretic and morphological complexity data using novel methods that better account for model uncertainty in parameter estimation, as well as the genealogical relatedness and geographic proximity of languages. In line with my earlier findings, the results show no evidence that large numbers of L2 speakers have an effect on natural language complexity.
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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.