The ontogeny of discourse structure mimics the development of literature
📝 Abstract
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from verbal reports of 200 subjects ages 2-58, and 676 literary texts spanning ~5,000 years. In healthy subjects, lexical diversity, graph size, and long-range recurrence departed from initial near-random levels through a monotonic asymptotic increase across ages, while short-range recurrence showed a corresponding decrease. These changes were explained by education and suggest a hierarchical development of discourse structure: short-range recurrence and lexical diversity stabilize after elementary school, but graph size and long-range recurrence only stabilize after high school. This gradual maturation was blurred in psychotic subjects, who maintained in adulthood a near-random structure. In literature, monotonic asymptotic changes over time were remarkable: While lexical diversity, long-range recurrence and graph size increased away from near-randomness, short-range recurrence declined, from above to below random levels. Bronze Age texts are structurally similar to childish or psychotic discourses, but subsequent texts converge abruptly to the healthy adult pattern around the onset of the Axial Age (800-200 BC), a period of pivotal cultural change. Thus, individually as well as historically, discourse maturation increases the range of word recurrence away from randomness.
💡 Analysis
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from verbal reports of 200 subjects ages 2-58, and 676 literary texts spanning ~5,000 years. In healthy subjects, lexical diversity, graph size, and long-range recurrence departed from initial near-random levels through a monotonic asymptotic increase across ages, while short-range recurrence showed a corresponding decrease. These changes were explained by education and suggest a hierarchical development of discourse structure: short-range recurrence and lexical diversity stabilize after elementary school, but graph size and long-range recurrence only stabilize after high school. This gradual maturation was blurred in psychotic subjects, who maintained in adulthood a near-random structure. In literature, monotonic asymptotic changes over time were remarkable: While lexical diversity, long-range recurrence and graph size increased away from near-randomness, short-range recurrence declined, from above to below random levels. Bronze Age texts are structurally similar to childish or psychotic discourses, but subsequent texts converge abruptly to the healthy adult pattern around the onset of the Axial Age (800-200 BC), a period of pivotal cultural change. Thus, individually as well as historically, discourse maturation increases the range of word recurrence away from randomness.
📄 Content
1 The ontogeny of discourse structure mimics the development of literature
Natália B. Mota 1*, Sylvia Pinheiro 1*, Mariano Sigman 2, Diego Fernández Slezak 3,4, Guillermo Cecchi 5, Mauro Copelli 6#, Sidarta Ribeiro 1#
* Equal contribution
Corresponding authors
1 -‐ Instituto do Cérebro, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil. 2-‐ Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 3 -‐ Departamento de Computación, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 4 -‐ Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación, CONICET, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 5 -‐ Computational Biology Center – Neuroscience, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, USA. 6 -‐ Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil.
Acknowledgements: Work supported by UFRN, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), grants Universal 480053/2013-‐8 and Research Productivity 306604/2012-‐4 and 310712/2014-‐9; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) Projeto ACERTA; Fundação de Amparo à Ciência e Tecnologia do Estado de Pernambuco (FACEPE); Center for Neuromathematics of the São Paulo Research Foundation FAPESP (grant # 2013/07699-‐0), Boehringer-‐Ingelheim International GmbH (contract # 270561). We thank M Posner, S Dehaene, S Bunge, CJ Cela Conde, S Lipina, D Araujo, C Queiroz, J Sitt, JV Lisboa, A Cabana, J Queiroz, J Luban, LF Tófoli, and A Guerreiro for insightful discussions; M Laub and JE Agualusa for source material, PPC Maia for IT support, D Koshiyama for bibliographic support; and Instituto Metrópole Digital UFRN for cloud usage.
2 Abstract
Discourse varies with age, education, psychiatric state and historical epoch, but the ontogenetic and cultural dynamics of discourse structure remain to be quantitatively characterized. To this end we investigated word graphs obtained from verbal reports of 200 subjects ages 2-‐58, and 676 literary texts spanning ~5,000 years. In healthy subjects, lexical diversity, graph size, and long-‐range recurrence departed from initial near-‐random levels through a monotonic asymptotic increase across ages, while short-‐range recurrence showed a corresponding decrease. These changes were explained by education and suggest a hierarchical development of discourse structure: short-‐range recurrence and lexical diversity stabilize after elementary school, but graph size and long-‐range recurrence only stabilize after high school. This gradual maturation was blurred in psychotic subjects, who maintained in adulthood a near-‐random structure. In literature, monotonic asymptotic changes over time were remarkable: While lexical diversity, long-‐range recurrence and graph size increased away from near-‐randomness, short-‐range recurrence declined, from above to below random levels. Bronze Age texts are structurally similar to childish or psychotic discourses, but subsequent texts converge abruptly to the healthy adult pattern around the onset of the Axial Age (800-‐200 BC), a period of pivotal cultural change. Thus, individually as well as historically, discourse maturation increases the range of word recurrence away from randomness.
3
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