Comparing phonological and orthographic networks: A multiplex analysis

Abstract

The complexity of natural language can be explored by means of multiplex analyses at different scales, from single words to groups of words or sentence levels. Here, we plan to investigate a multiplex word-level network, which comprises an orthographic and a phonological network defined in terms of distance similarity. We systematically compare basic structural network properties to determine similarities and differences between them, as well as their combination in a multiplex configuration. As a natural extension of our work, we plan to evaluate the preservation of the structural network properties and information-based quantities from the following perspectives: (i) presence of similarities across 12 natural languages from 4 linguistic families (Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Uralic), (ii) increase of the size of the number of words (corpus) from 104 to 50 × 103, and (iii) robustness of the networks. Our preliminary findings reinforce the idea of common organizational properties among natural languages. Once concluded, will contribute to the characterization of similarities and differences in the orthographic and phonological perspectives of language networks at a word-level.