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Communicative efficiency and institutional pressure on language
How do languages become the way they are today? An influential view is that languages are shaped by pressures towards communicative …
Sihan Chen
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Cross-cultural structures of personal name systems reflect general communicative principles
The structure of personal names appears to differ widely across cultures. Using census records and historical datasets, we present an …
Michael Ramscar, Sihan Chen, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald
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Cross-cultural structures of personal name systems reflect general communicative principles
The Influence of Prior Semantic Knowledge in Noisy Channel Interpretation
How do comprehenders interpret semantically implausible sentences? Previous studies proposed a noisy-channel framework of sentence …
Sihan Chen, Lia Washington, Edward Gibson
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Linguistic correlates of societal variation: A quantitative analysis
Traditionally, many researchers have supported a uniformitarian view whereby all languages are of roughly equal complexity, facilitated …
Sihan Chen, David Gil, Sergey Gaponov, Jana Reifegerste, Tessa Yuditha, Tatiana Tatarinova, Ljiljana Progovac, Antonio Benítez-Burraco
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More complex societies have more complex kinship lexicons
Increasing evidence suggests that language complexity is sensitive to sociopolitical factors.While most quantitative research has …
Sihan Chen, David Gil, Antonio Benítez-Burraco
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The absence of a trade-off between morphological and syntactic complexity
The hypothesis that all languages are equally complex often invokes a trade-off principle, according to which if a language is more …
Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Sihan Chen, David Gil
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Rational Sentence Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese
Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy-channel model: They integrate both the …
Meilin Zhan, Sihan Chen, Roger Levy, Jiayi Lu, Edward Gibson
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An information-theoretic approach to the typology of spatial demonstratives
We explore systems of spatial deictic words (such as ‘here’ and ‘there’) from the perspective of communicative efficiency using …
Sihan Chen, Richard Futrell, Kyle Mahowald
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The effect of context on noisy-channel sentence comprehension
The process of sentence comprehension must allow for the possibility of noise in the input, e.g., from speaker error, listener …
Sihan Chen, Sarah Nathaniel, Rachel Ryskin, Edward Gibson
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Speech adapts to differences in dentition within and across populations
We test the hypothesis that a specific anatomical feature, the dental malocclusion associated with reduced dental wear, causes …
Caleb Everett, Sihan Chen
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Speech adapts to differences in dentition within and across populations