The DOI matches its Crossref record; 33 of the 33 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The small world of human language
Open accessAbstract
Words in human language interact in sentences in non-random ways, and allow humans to construct an astronomic variety of sentences from a limited number of discrete units. This construction process is extremely fast and robust. The co-occurrence of words in sentences reflects language organization in a subtle manner that can be described in terms of a graph of word interactions. Here, we show that such graphs display two important features recently found in a disparate number of complex systems. (i) The so called small-world effect. In particular, the average distance between two words, d (i.e. the average minimum number of links to be crossed from an arbitrary word to another), is shown to be d approximately equal to 2-3, even though the human brain can store many thousands. (ii) A scale-free distribution of degrees. The known pronounced effects of disconnecting the most connected vertices in such networks can be identified in some language disorders. These observations indicate some unexpected features of language organization that might reflect the evolutionary and social history of lexicons and the origins of their flexibility and combinatorial nature.
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Cites
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Albert, R., Jeong, H., & Barabási, A.-L. (2000) · Nature · doi:10.1038/35019019 · Cited by 7,534
Error and attack tolerance of complex networksPreprint
Albert, R., Jeong, H., & Barabási, A.-Ĺ. (2000) · Cited by 6,467
The Large-Scale Organization of Metabolic Networks
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Amaral, L. A. N., Scala, A., Barthélémy, M., & Stanley, H. E. (2000) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.200327197 · Cited by 3,051
ON A CLASS OF SKEW DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS
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The Major Transitions in Evolution
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The Structure and Function of Complex Networks
Newman, M. E. J. (2003) · SIAM Review · doi:10.1137/s003614450342480 · Cited by 18,719
Network motifs: simple building blocks of complex networks.
Milo, R., Shen-Orr, S., Itzkovitz, S., Kashtan, N., Chklovskii, D., & Alon, U. (2002) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.298.5594.824 · Cited by 7,368
Hierarchical organization in complex networks
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Graph embedding techniques, applications, and performance: A survey
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Watts, D. J. (2004) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.30.020404.104342 · Cited by 1,163
Metadata
- Authors
- Cancho, R. F. I., & Solé, R. V.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 2001-11-07
- Volume
- 268
- Issue
- 1482
- Pages
- 2261-2265
- ISSN
- 0080-4649 (ISSN-L)
- 0962-8452
- 1471-2954
- OpenAlex
- W2050715692
- Cited by
- 1,046
- References
- 33
- FWCI
- 17.64
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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