Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 8: Focus Session: Complex Systems Approaches to Language and Communication

SOE 8.7: Talk

Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 12:30–12:45, GÖR 226

Endogenous and exogenous effects on the adoption curves of linguistic innovations — •Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad, Martin Gerlach, Jose M. Miotto, and Eduardo G. Altmann — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden,Germany

It is well accepted that adoption of innovations are described by S-curves (slow start, accelerating period, and slow end). In this talk we search for a quantitative description of the curve of total number of adopters as a function of time and we analyze how much information on the dynamics of innovation spreading can be obtained from them. We are particularly interested in the case of linguistic innovations because detailed databases of written texts from the last 200 years allow for an unprecedent statistical precision. Combining data analysis with simulations of simple models (e.g., the Bass dynamics on networks) we identify signatures of endogenous and exogenous factors in the adoption curves and we propose a method to quantify the strength of these factors from data. We obtain that in cases in which the exogenous factors are dominant (e.g., in the 1901 and 1996 orthographic reforms of German) the adoption curve is better described by an exponential than by an S-curve.