Poor Networks, Neurons and Lookaheads

Syntactic networks bear similarities to biological networks since their levels are scale-free, i.e. the distribution of nodes and edges follow a power law (e.g. social networks), and small-world, i.e. most nodes can be reached by a relatively small number of steps (e.g. social networks):

From Wikipedia [EN] [ES]

A group of researchers at the Institute of Applied Linguistics in Beijing, China tried to find similarities between semantic and syntactic networks via a statistical approach and a treebank with semantic roles. Both networks are represented by small-world and scale-free graphs but differ in hierarchical structure, k-Nearest-Neighbour correlation and semantic networks tend to create longer paths, which makes it a poorer hierarchy in comparison to syntactic networks: Statistical properties of Chinese semantic networks


Temporal fluctations in speech are easily corrected by our brain. For decades this mechanism was a mystery. Two researches of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel described how neurons adjust to decode distorted sound perfectly. Although I don't understand this very technical paper, it'll perhaps provide new algorithms for speech processing: Time-Warp-Invariant Neuronal Processing

Another improvement for speech recognition and production was achieved by the Max Plank Society which developed a new mathematical model. It's based on the look-ahead assumption, i.e. our brain tries to estimate the most probable sound-sequence based on previous information, e.g. 'hot su...' = 'sun' > 'supper': Recognizing Sequences of Sequences

Points of Interest 16. March, 2009

1. Joint attention and the difference between we and I might be the key in order to understand language evolution.
My opinion is, that language evolved to set borders. The border of I; my person, my belongings, my needs and thoughts, my standing within society - in opposition to others.
The border of we; our tribe, our race, our territory, our hunting grounds, our ideals - in opposition to others.
Language is a cultural and psychological necessity to govern, identify, interact and define oneself if things are getting more complex. A biological necessity to define entities in time and space and to interact with them in a complex way on different planes. A way to optimize doing things, like hunting strategies, complex hierarchies, standings to other tribes: A Tale Without Episodes

2. A very strange article. As a computerlinguist I'm very interested in how they compute the evolution of a language. I can't imagine how this could work. There are several factors which seem to be just too random to be calculated. How did they trace the words? Did they use OCR to scan documents and match words? There is this particular paragraph, which I don't understand at all:

"Looking to the future, the less frequently certain words are used, the more likely they are to be replaced. Other simple rules have been uncovered - numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as 'and', 'or', 'but' , 'on', 'over' and 'against' evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals."

What does evolve mean here? Change? How can prepositions change? These things are bound by perception and are, in my opinion, as static as numerals: Scientists discover oldest words in the English language and predict which ones are likely to disappear in the future

3. I'm quite into morbid things; like mummies and anatomical stuff. Lately, Pink Tentacle wrote a post about monster mummies and living mummies - formerly known as living Buddhist monks. They've killed themselves (slowly) in a timespan of 3000 days and now are relics of a sort: Monster mummies of Japan

4. Does your language influence your preference in music? Language and music are associated: Why music sounds right - the hidden tones in our own speech

5. A very basic lecture about language held at Yale University. It covers fundamentals of linguistics - Pidgin & Creoles, language as human trait, language universals, (innate) language capacity, phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics (in this order) and so on: How Do We Communicate?: Language in the Brain, Mouth and the Hands

Points of Interest 17. February, 2009

1. 20 years prison or death sentence for translating the Qu'ran? Welcome to our illustrious humanistic and democratic circle, dear Afghanistan: The dangers of translation

2. Help to classify galaxies and work for science, now! You'll be shown pictures of galaxies and asked questions about their spiral arms and other features. A task which you can do better than a computer and will help astronomy: Galaxy Zoo 2

3. The 2009 Jōyō Kanji update is coming up and the two favourites are 俺 (ore, which means informal "I") and 誰 (dare, question pronoun "who?"). I think "dare" is quite common these days, even in formal context. Of course one can say donata which is more formal: Jōyō list to level up

4. Speech perception is much more than hearing sounds. There are several other senses than hearing involved: Read my lips: Using multiple senses in speech perception

5. Steven Pinker explains the critical points of his book "The Blank Slate":

Points of Interest 05. October, 2008

1. Please dear god make this an imperative:

2. Why don't apes use language although they could? Because they don't have a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality. Bolles' Review of Tomasello's Power Point Prose: Part 1 & Part 2

3. I always wondered which type of camouflage the US Army use since it looks like bad pixels of ancient computer days. Here's why they use digital camouflage: Can You See Me Now?

4. Dying of capsaicin? Well, I eat Habaneros every day - no joke: Which organisms can feel pain? & Chili, capsaicin and cancer

5. Time for linguistic lolcat:

6. After several years of detective work, philologists at the University of Stavanger in Norway have collected a unique collection of texts online. Now they're about to start the most comprehensive analysis of middle English ever: New life for Middle English: Norwegian detective work gives new knowledge of the English language.

7. Syntactic persistence is the tendency for speakers to produce sentences using similar grammatical patterns and rules of language as those they have used before. Although the way this occurs is not well understood, previous research has indicated that this effect may involve a specific aspect of memory function. Memory is made up of two components: declarative and procedural. Declarative memory is used in remembering events and facts. Procedural memory helps us to remember how to perform tasks, such as playing the piano or riding a bike. A recent study suggests that the common phrase, "it's so easy, it's like riding a bike" should perhaps be replaced with "it's so easy, it's like forming a sentence.": Un-total recall: Amnesics remember grammar, but not meaning of new sentences

9. Cool new robots from Japan with cool abilities: Photos: Robots at CEATEC 2008

10. It's the thalamus that actually matters for sentence processing: Thalamus? Yes. Basal ganglia? Nope.

11. Beautiful statue: "Transi de René de Chalon," Ligier Richier, 1547

12. Broca's area shows a "sentence complexity" effect. It responds more during the comprehension of object relative (OR) constructions than easier to process subject relative (SR) constructions: Broca's area, sentence comprehension, and working memory

13. Carbon nanotechnology in an 17th century Damascus sword

14. A Bob Dylon song encoded in XML: Encoding Dylan

15. Why choose the lesser evil?

16. Interesting, really: How to beat of a cold

17. Taking the new out of neurons

18. Robo-starfish learns about itself and adapts to injuries

19: 2008 IgNobels

Points of Interest 22. September, 2008

1. Listeneres can only keep up with the rapid rate of speech (5 syllables/second) because they anticipate the missing possible syllables of the word. A new study conducted by scientists of the University of Rochester and Georgia Tech showed that this is not only true for the phonology but also the semantics of words: Scientists watch as listener's brain predicts speaker's words & Neural correlates of partial lexical activation

2. At age 3–4, the overwhelming majority of children behave selfishly, whereas most children at age 7–8 prefer resource allocations that remove advantageous or disadvantageous inequality: Egalitarianism in young children

3. The evolution of speech. Speech recognition part in macaques found: Monkey Brains Hint at Evolutionary Root of Language Processing

4. World largest semantic map revealed. First steps toward Semantic Web? Computers figuring out what words mean

5. The right word is in our jaw: Speaking Without Sound & Breakthrough in understanding of speech offers hope to the deaf

6. Stuttering causes bilingualism: Does bilingualism cause stuttering?

7. Neuroaesthetics? Beauty & the Brain and Beauty and the Brain

8. Save humanity. But first I want more funds for computational linguistics: Funding the Mitigation of Extinction Risks and How can we reduce the risk of human extinction?

9. Humans - The best race there is and ever was on earth? Stop kidding me, Lystrosaurus dominated more: Technologies to Watch Out For: Self-Copying

10. The geometric bucket a systematical view: A simple toy, and what it says about how we learn to mentally rotate objects

11. Oh my arse: The Evolution of Assholes

12. The seven gates to humanity: What I've Learned About Human Origins

13. I like the picture of possible paths for human evolution: Mark Stoneking’s Four Models Of Human Origins

14. About rhymes in Japanese Hip Hop and what they reveal about the language: I'll experiment like a scientist/ You wanna rhyme, you gotta sign my list

15. “Thinking about Not-Thinking”: Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen Meditation

16. Suicidal Individuals: Evaluation, Therapies, and Ethics – Part 1 & Part 2

Points of Interest 17. September, 2008

I got a bit picky about the Points of Interest I choose these days; so less is more. A problem which occured while writing this and which is bothering me: What's the difference between:

a) It is not
b) It isn't
c) It's not

I think the first is the most emphasised because there is no contraction at all. The second emphasises the subject - due to the contraction of "is not" the stress shifts to "It". The third emphasises the negation because the stress lies on "not". Language Hat had a post about this in 2005.

1. [...] findings suggest that New Caledonian crows can solve complex physical problems by reasoning both causally and analogically about causal relations: Do New Caledonian crows solve physical problems through causal reasoning?

Alex Taylor explains the experiment:

2. Pro Transhumanism. It's not a matter of philosophy - It's a matter of time: Transhumanism as Universal

3. About the temperature of excluding metaphors: Social exclusion literally feels cold

4. Pulvermuller's vs. Wernicke-Lichtheim's functional anatomy of language: Pulvermuller = Wernicke-Lichtheim

Points of Interest 15. September, 2008

1. An interesting article about the neurobiology of a hallucination based on Ffytche, D. (2008). The hodology of hallucinations. Cortex 44: 1067-1083. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2008.04.005:

"In the EEG experiments, the activity recorded from two of the electrodes was found to become sychronous whilst the subjects were hallucinating. [...] Ffytche hypothesizes that the changes in connectivity could be due to changes in the firing mode of the thalamo-cortical connections [...] Overall, Fytche's findings suggest that hallucination cannot be explained by a topological or hodological explanation alone, but instead by a combination of the two. [...]"

2. Gestalt meets linguistic relativism: What Bolles have learned about language.

3. "[...] some so-far anonymous computational linguist caused United Airlines to lose more than a billion dollars of its market capitalization, over the course of about 12 minutes last Monday: Economic linguistics

4. Who carried out 9/11? Views Differ...

5. From E-Paper to Semantic Web. What kind of technologies could we expect in 2018? Nature asks: What will happen in the next 10 years?

Points of Interest 26. August, 2008

Found two extraordinary humorous blogs:

1. The world on file cards: http://indexed.blogspot.com/

2. All about Hitler: http://blogs.taz.de/hitlerblog/


Back to the daily scientific work:

1. Can Brains Point the Way?

2. Is Ambiguity Bad?

3. Music and memory: How the songs we heard growing up shape the story of our lives

4. A simple metric to infer personality from facial expression

5. Mirror self-recognition in Magpies

6. The smell of fear

7. Mirror neurons, hubs, and puppet masters

8. Evil and Theodicy, Part 1: Are Happiness and Virtue Linked?

9. Evil and Theodicy, Part 2: Can Happinees and Virtue Be Linked?

10. Evil and Theodicy, Part 3: Kant, Authenticity, and Lament

Points of Interest 13. August, 2008

キタ━━━(゜∀゜)━━━!!!!!, (゜どうも，おひさしぶりです!


1. The genetic component to European ethnic groups. You can see a clear distinction between individuals with northern from southern European ancestry. Interestingly, these genetic boundaries often mark linguistic boundaries too: Genetic, Geographic, And Linguistic Structure Of European Populations

2. "Jugemu" is a rakugo, verbal entertainment, which everybody in Japan knows: Jugemu Jugemu Go-Kō-no-Surikire Kaijari-suigyo no Suigyō-matsu Unrai-matsu Fūrai-matsu Kū-Neru Tokoro ni Sumu Tokoro Yaburakōji no Burakōji Paipo Paipo Paipo no Shūringan Shūringan no Gūrindai Gūrindai no Ponpokopii no Ponpokonā no Chōkyūmei no Chōsuke

3. Are nouns and verbs represented differently in the brain? A typical view is that they are, with nouns relying more on temporal cortices and verbs on frontal regions: Representation of nouns and verbs in the brain

4. Participation in most sports requires agility, impeccable timing and the planning and execution of complex movements, so that actions such as catching a ball or throwing it into a hoop can be performed. Performing well at sports also requires anticipating and accurately predicting the movements of others: The baller's brain (and his pinky)

5. Did the introduction of cooking, have caused a relaxation of selective constraints on diet-related genes: Advent Of Cooking & The Big Cognitive Leap In Human Evolution

6. Totally awesome. I think bionics is the future technology: Robot controlled by "brain" in a culture dish

7. The top thirty 顔文字 (kaomoji/emoticons) used in Japan: Top thirty Japanese emoticons

8. Rap version of LHC from CERN - soon they'll blow up the world: Large Hadron Rap

9. Post about the Japanese pronoun nanji: I want to talk about you

10. The eye tells the brain when to plasticize

11. Mélange

12. England's rock art

13. Dinosaur Supertree

14. Collectie Ver Huell

15. Simulated Linguistic Evolution In The Laboratory

16. Testosterone and aggression, or what Frank's Red Hot Sauce has to do with handgun violence

17. Tone deafness and bad singing may not go hand in hand

18. Do you choke under pressure? Depends on what you're trying to accomplish

19. If you want to persuade a woman, look straight at her

20. 'Beer goggles' are real - it's official

21. US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability'

22. Has porn become mainstream? Not really

23. Did the Baldwin Effect Give Us Language?

24. On Human Nature

Points of Interest 30. July, 2008

1. It has long been debated whether dinosaurs were part of the ‘Terrestrial Revolution’ that occurred some 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous when birds, mammals, flowering plants, insects and reptiles all underwent a rapid expansion: Dinosaur Supertree

2. Take one part gorgeous ornamental typography and one part diabolical imagery. Combine slowly over a low heat with incidental visual curiosities. Add caprice to taste. Serve haphazardly over a bed of 19th century lithographic stones. For best effect, consume before retiring: Collectie Ver Huell

3. If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future: Where Is Human Evolution Heading?

4. Today's Daily Telegraph contains a fascinating extract from Norman Doidge's new book The Brain That Changes Itself, about a woman who feels that she is constantly falling because she has lost her sense of balance as a result of damage to the vestibular system: Perpetually falling woman learns to balance with her tongue

5. Jump to Comments Language is a product of culture. Or is it? Which came first — language or culture? That’s like asking if the chicken or the egg came first. But cultural behavior has been documented in animals who do not have language systems, like gorillas who have intricate systems of processing plants: Can There Be A Synthesis Between Cultural And Biological Evolution?

6. Could we have evolved speech without evolving morality, or morality without evolving speech: A Biological Revolution

Points of Interest 22. July, 2008

1. Literary criticism sucks. So true, so true: Impostor

2. Windows into heaven: Notes on the Theology of Icons, Part 4: Reverse Perspective

3. Hilarious flashgame. Create your own disease and kill mankind: Pandemic 2

4. Differences Between Cognition & Memory Of Males And Females Linked To Two Genes

5. Speech's Stabilizing Forces

6. Sorry, Charlie, you and Nemo aren't the only fish that talk

7. UPM School of Computing researchers open up a new road for the computational representation of languages

Points of Interest 18. July, 2008

Some changes are going down. I won't write in German anymore since I have almost no German readers and German linguists aren't really interested in state of the art theories.

1. A picture of an abnormally folded amyloid fibril reconstructed in 3D: Detailed 3D image of Alzheimer's pathology

2. Third part of the Iconography series on Experimental Theology. : Notes on the Theology of Icons, Part 3: Time and Space

3. Ubiquity of same-sex couplings in nature.

Points of Interest 14. July, 2008

1. "You Otaku are already dead." That's the new title of a book which discusses the rise and fall of the Otaku aristorcracy of Japan: Speaker for the Dead

2. Food for token, please: Can animals comprehend the power of symbols?

3. One, two, three - a monkey is what I want to be: Counting monkeys tick off yet another 'human' ability

4. Highly debatted Goldin-Meadow paper about 'SOV' charade order: When using gestures, rules of grammar remain the same despite speakers' language

5. Same issue. Wired article: Roots of Language Run Deeper Than Speech

6. To hell with linguistic phylogenetics: A Look at Linguistic Evolution

7. Beat the hell out of those Generativists: Language Adapted to Us

8. Hug those lovely Generativists: Questions For A Theory

9. Take it into your own hands: Keeping Hands Where You Can See Them Alters Perception, Study Finds

10. I'll be a chimp again: Will Our Future Brains Be Smaller?

11. Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral

12. Notes on the Theology of Icons, Part 1: Stylization

13. Notes on the Theology of Icons, Part 2: Light

14. I Can't Understand Your Accent, So Keep Talking

15. Shakespeare makes us alive: The Shakespeared brain

Points of Interest 03. July, 2008

Everyone's talking about the upcoming Christiansen and Chater paper and that Universal Grammar, especially the Poverty of Stimulus argument, will be destroyed. I'm curious.


1. NLP (Natural Language Processing) goes Mainstream: Powerset bought by Microsoft

2. David Beaver's critique on the New Scientist's article Charades reveals a universal sentence structure: Charades does not reveal a universal sentence structure

3. Diffusion Spectrum Imaging Used to Map the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex

Point of Interest 01. July, 2008

1. Intriguing proposal on a community's ability to shape speech by self-organisation and contagion: Speech, Community and Power

2. Computational linguistics history - the ALPAC report: "These can be aptly compared with the challenges, problems, and insights of particle physics"

3. 10 Extraordinary Burial Ceremonies From Around The World

4. The Richness of the Stimulus

5. Charades reveals a universal sentence structure

Points of Interest 18. June, 2008

Long time no see!


1. Who cares about society? Let's have gay sex! It depends on you own choice and your genetics: Society's Attitudes Have Little Impact On Choice Of Sexual Partner

2. I'll become rich and you'll die of cancer because I know everything about you: Seeing ourselves / Seeing others - built in errors

3. There are only 4 elements: Earth, Wind, Fire, Water and not 100: Only a theory!

4. My neolithic stone projectile is going to be so big that it'll blast away the whole universe: Culture does, in fact, optimize

5. I can write this shit since my brain's so big. Actually it is has something to do with gradualism and integration: Building a New Brain from Old Parts

6. At least this post will be a success to our species: Humor Shown To Be Fundamental To Our Success As A Species

7. Oh well, I got lice that's why I'm talking rubbish: Can parasites influence the language we speak?

Points of Interest 11. June, 2008

1. The old story - biologist does a paper about language with cool phylogenetic, cladistic or mathematic models and it's published without a consult from a linguist: Math and its uses

2. Beautiful Japanese poem from Ryôkan translated by No-sword: Moment of silence

3. Growing new brain cells enhanced by social contact

4. The neural circuits of free choice

5. The End of Akiba? No.

6. Serotonin Link To Impulsivity, Decision-making, Confirmed

7. 'Super Paper:' New Nanopaper More Break-resistant Than Cast Iron

8. Robot Asimo can understand three voices at once

9. Have we begun to crack the brain's code?

Points of Interest 09. June, 2008

1. German literature and foreign language puns

2. Handling exponential growth in demographic model

3. Sex differences in judging attractiveness - brain correlates

4. Body position affects memory for events

5. What's more convincing than talking about brains? Pictures of brains!

6. Toolmaking and Speech

7. Honeybee dance breaks down cultural barrier

Points of Interest 04. June, 2008

1. The evolution of language. It's not nature versus nurture but nature and nurture in my opinion: The Workings of Co-Evolution

2. The evolution of music. Check out the article on Nature if you can: The Evolution of Music

3. All hail our chimpanzee leaders: Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind? 30 years later

4. Ficition versus reality - the difference in a MRI: Meeting George Bush versus Meeting Cinderella

5. Buehler deserves some respect, bitches: Karl Bühler/Buhler/Buehler on the Evolution of Language

6. I'd nominate this headline for the most freaky one I've ever seen and beware the article itself is even stranger: Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps

7. Oh well, too good to be true: Good News In Our DNA: Defects You Can Fix With Vitamins And Minerals

8. Cannabis makes you even more stupid (you have to be stupid to do drugs): Long-term Cannabis Users May Have Structural Brain Abnormalities

9. Micro-robots Dance On Something Smaller Than A Pin's Head

Points of Interest 25. May, 2008

1. Interesting and humorous, unfortunately I'm light years from any degree:
Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?

2. About the mascot of the Nara 1300th-anniversary. It's about the capital move from Fujiwara to Nara. The second part with the poem is interesting. It shows the complexity of Japanese poems: Sento out!

3. Interesting facts about the Ainu language: Ainu, Utari, Ainu

4. The powerless will always be powerless: Lacking power diminishes cognitive function

5. Reason versus emotion: The MRI of morality?

6. Be careful with the interpretation of MRIs: MRI - the new phrenology

7. Parents' influence on kids' behavior: Not much

8. What Chutes and Ladders has to do with learning Math

9. Can we learn from errors? What if we're running a nuclear power plant?

10. Doing algebra - it's the little things that count

11. Space and Syntax