Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form–frequency correspondences and predictability

Frequency vs . iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries

This paper argues that three widely accepted motivating factors subsumed under the broad heading of iconicity, namely iconicity of quantity, iconicity of complexity and iconicity of cohesion, in fact have no role in explaining grammatical asymmetries and should be discarded. The iconicity accounts of the relevant phenomena have been proposed by authorities like Jakobson, Haiman and Givón, but I...

Explaining Basic Categories: Feature Predictability and Information

The category utility hypothesis holds that categories are useful because they can be used to predict the features of instances and that the categories that tend to survive and become preferred in a culture (basic-level categories) are those that best improve the category users' ability to perform this function. Starting from this hypothesis, a quantitative measure of the utility of a category i...

Visual Representation Determines Search Difficulty: Explaining Visual Search Asymmetries

In visual search experiments there exist a variety of experimental paradigms in which a symmetric set of experimental conditions yields asymmetric corresponding task performance. There are a variety of examples of this that currently lack a satisfactory explanation. In this paper, we demonstrate that distinct classes of asymmetries may be explained by virtue of a few simple conditions that are ...

Anaphora in Conversation: Grammatical Coding and Preference Organization

Source Coding and Parallel Routing: Exploring the Asymmetries

| We consider a simple communication network model and focus on a single sourcedestination pair to exploit the interconnection between Source Coding and Parallel Routing. We consider a Distortion Measure that combines signal reconstruction fldelity with network delay and we pose the problem of minimizing this measure by jointly choosing the encoder parameters and the routing parameters and exte...