Resumen

TORRE, Iván G.; ARTIME, Oriol; HERNANDEZ-FERNANDEZ, Antonio  y  LUQUE, Bartolo. Is speech a self-organized critical signal?. Inter disciplina [online]. 2020, vol.8, n.20, pp.113-128.  Epub 14-Ago-2020. ISSN 2448-5705.  https://doi.org/10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2020.20.71206.

Throughout the twentieth century, studies in quantitative linguistics have been showing the emergence of potential laws in languages, first in written texts and later in speech. These laws seem ubiquitous and robust but, why do they appear in language? Are they spurious results due to the arbitrariness of the segmentation of words or are they really universal and a result of complex communication? Can we investigate the presence of these laws in other animal communication systems of which we do not know the code? So, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches in linguistics and in the study of communication systems seem essential.

As an example, two recent studies on acoustic corpus of up to sixteen languages are presented, using a general method of segmentation of signals (threshold method). We present briefly here these methods and concepts and explore the possibility that the statistical laws that emerge in human language are fruit of the self-organized criticality, ubiquitous in Nature. With the threshold method is possible to analyze any type of signal even if its code is unknown, which pave the way to new comparative studies between human language and animal communication systems.

Palabras llave : scaling laws; linguistic laws; self-organized criticality; threshold method; human voice.

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