The physical, mathematical, and information sciences have developed a number of ways to measure complexity and complex systems in the social, biological, and physical domains. One way of measuring complex systems that might be useful to language scientists is the set of tools from the interdisciplinary field known as network science. A number of studies that have used the tools of network science to examine various aspects of language and language processing are summarized. It is acknowledged that much work must be done to use the tools of network science to address the debate about the (equal) complexity of languages. However, this work may prove useful to language scientists interested in the (equal) complexity of languages, as well as in other topics about language. Furthermore, the distinct structural characteristics observed in networks of several languages to date may also prove useful to network scientists as they try to understand how certain structural characteristics influence network dynamics in other domains. Language scientists are urged to embrace the techniques of network science to address the question of the complexity of languages.
Network science is an emerging discipline drawing from sociology, computer science, physics and a number of other fields to examine complex systems in economical, biological, social, and technological domains. To examine these complex systems, nodes are used to represent individual entities, and links are used to represent relationships between entities, forming a web-like structure, or network, of the entire system. The structure that emerges in these complex networks influences the dynamics of that system. We provide a short review of how this mathematical approach has been used to examine the structure found in the phonological lexicon, and of how subsequent psycholinguistic investigations demonstrate that several of the structural characteristics of the phonological network influence various language-related processes, including word retrieval during the recognition and production of spoken words, recovery from instances of failed lexical retrieval, and the acquisition of word-forms. This approach allows researchers to examine the lexicon at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, holding much promise for increasing our understanding of language-related processes and representations.
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