Conditions of applicability of the laws established for thermodynamic entropy do not necessarily fit to the entropy defined for information. Therefore, one must handle carefully the informational conclusions derived by mathematical analogies from the laws that hold for thermodynamic entropy. Entropy, and the arrow of its change are closely related to the arrows of the change of symmetry and of ...

Do children take into account their addressees’ needs in spontaneous production? Developmental evidence for speaker adjustments is mixed. Some studies show that children are often under-informative when communicating with ignorant addressees but other studies demonstrate successes in children’s ability to integrate another person’s perspective. We asked whether children adapt their event descri...

Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that –despite these differences– human languages might constitute different ‘solutions’ to common pressures of language use. Using Monte Carlo simulations over data from five languages,...