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The study of natural language using a network approach has made it possible to characterize novel properties ranging from the level of individual words to phrases or sentences. A natural way to quantitatively evaluate similarities and differences between spoken and written language is by means of a multiplex network defined in terms of a similarity distance between words. Here, we use a multiplex representation of words based on orthographic or phonological similarity to evaluate their structure. We report that from the analysis of topological properties of networks, there are different levels of local and global similarity when comparing written vs. spoken structure across 12 natural languages from 4 language families. In particular, it is found that differences between the phonetic and written layers is markedly higher for French and English, while for the other languages analyzed, this separation is relatively smaller. We conclude that the multiplex approach allows us to explore additional properties of the interaction between spoken and written language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]