TITLE:
Deep Language Statistics of Italian throughout Seven Centuries of Literature and Empirical Connections with Miller’s 7 ∓ 2 Law and Short-Term Memory
AUTHORS:
Emilio Matricciani
KEYWORDS:
GULPEASE, Italian, Literature, Miller’s Law, Readability, Short-Term Memory, Word Interval
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Statistics,
Vol.9 No.3,
June
30,
2019
ABSTRACT: Statistics of languages are usually calculated by counting characters,
words, sentences, word rankings. Some of these random variables are also the
main “ingredients” of classical readability formulae. Revisiting the
readability formula of Italian, known as GULPEASE, shows that of the two terms
that determine the readability index G—the semantic index , proportional to the number of
characters per word, and the syntactic
index GF, proportional
to the reciprocal of the number of words per sentence—GF is dominant because GC is, in practice, constant for any author throughout
seven centuries of Italian Literature. Each author can modulate the length of
sentences more freely than he can do with the length of words, and in different
ways from author to author. For any author, any couple of text variables can be
modelled by a linear relationship y = mx, but with different slope m from author to author, except for the relationship between
characters and words, which is unique for all. The most important relationship
found in the paper is that between the short-term memory capacity, described by Miller’s “7 ? 2 law” (i.e.,
the number of “chunks” that an average person can hold in the short-term memory ranges from 5 to 9), and the word interval, a new random variable
defined as the average number of words between two successive punctuation
marks. The word interval can be converted into a time interval through the average reading speed. The word interval spreads in the same range as Miller’s law, and the time interval is spread in the same range of short-term memory response times. The connection between
the word interval (and time interval) and short-term memory appears, at least empirically, justified
and natural, however, to be further investigated. Technical and
scientific writings (papers, essays, etc.) ask more to their readers because words are on the average longer,
the readability index G is lower,
word and time intervals are longer. Future work done on ancient languages, such
as the classical Greek and Latin Literatures (or modern languages Literatures),
could bring us an insight into the short-term memory required to their well-educated ancient readers.