Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure

JC Jackson, J Watts, TR Henry, JM List, R Forkel… - Science, 2019 - science.org
Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not
clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their …

From text to thought: How analyzing language can advance psychological science

JC Jackson, J Watts, JM List… - Perspectives on …, 2022 - journals.sagepub.com
Humans have been using language for millennia but have only just begun to scratch the
surface of what natural language can reveal about the mind. Here we propose that language …

Cultural influences on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment

B Thompson, SG Roberts, G Lupyan - Nature Human Behaviour, 2020 - nature.com
If the structure of language vocabularies mirrors the structure of natural divisions that are
universally perceived, then the meanings of words in different languages should closely …

Computer-Assisted Language Comparison: State of the ArtW

MS Wu, NE Schweikhard, T Bodt… - Journal of Open …, 2020 - eprints.soas.ac.uk
Historical language comparison opens windows onto a human past, long before the
availability of written records. Since traditional language comparison within the framework of …

[HTML][HTML] Lexibank, a public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features

JM List, R Forkel, SJ Greenhill, C Rzymski, J Englisch… - Scientific Data, 2022 - nature.com
The past decades have seen substantial growth in digital data on the world's languages. At
the same time, the demand for cross-linguistic datasets has been increasing, as witnessed …

From language development to language evolution: A unified view of human lexical creativity

T Brochhagen, G Boleda, E Gualdoni, Y Xu - Science, 2023 - science.org
A defining property of human language is the creative use of words to express multiple
meanings through word meaning extension. Such lexical creativity is manifested at different …

Trilled/r/is associated with roughness, linking sound and touch across spoken languages

B Winter, M Sóskuthy, M Perlman, M Dingemanse - Scientific Reports, 2022 - nature.com
Cross-modal integration between sound and texture is important to perception and action.
Here we show this has repercussions for the structure of spoken languages. We present a …

What are patterns of rise and decline?

A Raulo, A Rojas, B Kröger… - Royal Society …, 2023 - royalsocietypublishing.org
The notions of change, such as birth, death, growth, evolution and longevity, extend across
reality, including biological, cultural and societal phenomena. Patterns of change describe …

Multi-simlex: A large-scale evaluation of multilingual and crosslingual lexical semantic similarity

I Vulić, S Baker, EM Ponti, U Petti, I Leviant… - Computational …, 2020 - direct.mit.edu
Abstract We introduce Multi-SimLex, a large-scale lexical resource and evaluation
benchmark covering data sets for 12 typologically diverse languages, including major …

Inference of partial colexifications from multilingual wordlists

JM List - Frontiers in Psychology, 2023 - frontiersin.org
The past years have seen a drastic rise in studies devoted to the investigation of
colexification patterns in individual languages families in particular and the languages of the …