Researchers
believe that information theory — the discipline that gave us digital
communication — can explain differences between human languages.
The
majority of languages — roughly 85 percent of them — can be sorted into two
categories: those, like English, in which the basic sentence form is
subject-verb-object (“the girl kicks the ball”), and those, like Japanese, in
which the basic sentence form is subject-object-verb (“the girl the ball
kicks”).
The reason
for the difference has remained somewhat mysterious, but researchers from MIT’s
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences now believe that they can account
for it using concepts borrowed from information theory, the discipline,
invented almost singlehandedly by longtime MIT professor Claude Shannon, that
led to the digital revolution in communications. The researchers will present
their hypothesis in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.