Integrated Calendar

The conversion of ideas and thoughts into a linear train of words that represents them constitutes a channel of communication that we call language. The capacity for language is a relatively recent evolutionary development in humans, and according to the theory of language established by Chomsky, humans are born with a universal “internal grammar” that enables verbal communication. Although this idea is still controversial, it has support from genetic research: Certain mutations in a gene called FOXP2 significantly impair the ability for grammar. As a natural phenomenon stemming from genes and the brain, language should thus be amenable to the tools of analysis that physics employs with other natural phenomena.

We present three studies on the role of memory and correlations in language. In the first, we investigate the correlation network of words in written texts to identify a hierarchy structures that harnesses memory to bind topics of interest (‘concepts’). In the second study, we see how concepts are established by the existence of loops in a network of words linked by their definitions in a dictionary. Finally, we discuss recent work on how the music, or prosody, adds information to the text. We show that as we convert words into verbal utterances, our short-term memory creates chunks that are then spoken by the vocal chords and muscles. Our approach applies feature-based recognition, which has been extremely successful in image processing, to spoken language. Application to computerized analysis of emphasis in conversation and to the construction of a ‘prosodic dictionary’ will be discussed.