title: Emergence of linguistic laws in human voice.
abstract: Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of statistical patterns of language in acoustics are biased by the arbitrary, language-dependent segmentation of the signal, and virtually precludes the possibility of making comparative studies between human voice and other animal communication systems. Here we bridge this gap by proposing a method that allows to measure such patterns in acoustic signals of arbitrary origin, without needs to have access to the language corpus underneath. The method has been applied to sixteen different human languages, recovering successfully some well-known laws of human communication at timescales even below the phoneme and finding yet another link between complexity and criticality in a biological system. These methods further pave the way for new comparative studies in animal communication or the analysis of signals of unknown code.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, EIAE, Technical University of Madrid, Plaza Cardenal Cisneros, 28040, Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Iván González
authors.initials: IG
authors.lastname: Torre
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, EIAE, Technical University of Madrid, Plaza Cardenal Cisneros, 28040, Madrid, Spain.|School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E14NS, London, UK.
authors.forename: Bartolo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Luque
authors.affiliation: School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E14NS, London, UK.
authors.forename: Lucas
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lacasa
authors.affiliation: Telefonica Research, Edificio Telefonica-Diagonal 00, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Jordi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Luque
authors.affiliation: Complexity and Quantitative Linguistics Lab, Laboratory for Relational Algorithmics, Complexity and Learning (LARCA), Institut de Ciències de l'Educació, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Antoni
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hernández-Fernández
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D014831:Voice