Homophony and Disambiguation Through Sequential Processes in the Evolution of Language.

Human language may have evolved through a stage when words were combined into structured linear segments, before these segments were used as building blocks for a hierarchical grammar. This hypothesis is approached by examining the apparently ubiquitous prevalence of homophones. It suggests how, perhaps contrary to expectation, communicative capacity does not seem to be adversely affected by homophones, and how it is that they can be routinely used without confusion. These facts are principally explained by disambiguation through syntactic processing of short word sequences. Local sequential processing plays an underlying role in language production and perception, a hypothesis that is supported by evidence that small children engage in this process as soon as they acquire words. Experiments on a corpus of spoken English calculated the entropy for sequences of syntactically labelled words. They show there is a measurable advantage in decoding word strings when they are taken in short sequences, rather than as individual items. This suggests that grammatical fragments of speech could have been a stepping stone to a full grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]