Statistical laws and linguistics inform meaning in naturalistic and fictional conversation
This work addresses the application of statistical laws to conversation analysis, offering insights for linguistics and social science, but it is incremental as it extends existing methods to new data.
The study investigated how vocabulary size scales with conversation length in naturalistic and fictional dialogues, finding that scaling patterns differ by parts of speech.
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is through statistical patterns such as Heaps' law, which holds that vocabulary size scales with document length. Little work on Heaps' law has looked at conversation and considered how language features impact scaling. We measure Heaps' law for conversations recorded in two distinct mediums: 1. Strangers brought together on video chat and 2. Fictional characters in movies. We find that scaling of vocabulary size differs by parts of speech. We discuss these findings through behavioral and linguistic frameworks.