Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition

• Published in: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
• Main Authors: Sainburg, T., Mai, A., Gentner, T.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Humpback Whale
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000D-369D-6; http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000D-369F-4

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 organiz- ation 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 demon- strate similar long-range statistical dependencies. Therefore, we hypothesized that long-range statistical dependencies in human speech may occur indepen- dently 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