Abstract
Linguistic behaviors arise from strongly interacting, non-equilibrium systems. There is a wide range of spatial and temporal scales that are relevant for the analysis of speech. This makes it challenging to study language from a physical perspective. This paper reports on a longitudinal experiment designed to address some of the challenges. Linguistic and social preference behavior were observed in an ad-hoc social network over time. Eight people participated in weekly sessions for 10 weeks, playing a total of 535 map-navigation games. Analyses of the degree of order in social and linguistic behaviors revealed a global relaxation toward more ordered states. Fluctuations in linguistic behavior were associated with social preferences and with individual interactions.
Highlights
The challenge in studying language as a complex system is that our knowledge of the component systems is limited
Analyses of the time evolution of variability in system states shows relaxation-like decreases of disorder in some cases
Social and syntactic states—but not vowel states—showed exponential decay-like decreases in variability, which are suggestive of relaxation processes
Summary
The challenge in studying language as a complex system is that our knowledge of the component systems is limited. The surroundings can interact strongly with those components. One has to figure out how to usefully define systems and how to separate them from their surroundings. This includes constructing explicit state spaces, and attempting to reduce the influence of unobserved external forces. Efforts to accomplish these things are rarely pursued in linguistic research, and maybe with a good excuse: speech systems are profoundly complex. The modest aim of this paper is to show ways in which some of the issues associated with linguistic complexity can be addressed in an experimental context, by imposing constraints on behavior
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