Probability Distribution of Represented Sources in Conversations of Adults and Children

ABSTRACT Based upon a taxonomy of represented sources, this paper investigates the quantitative features of two groups – one comprised of adults and the other of seven-year-old children – that employ a variety of sources in everyday representation. Results indicate that: 1) the overall probability distributions of represented sources used by both groups fit well to the modified right truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution; 2) the R2 value of the adult group is lower than that of the child group, largely due to the prevalence of non-present non-specified human references by the adults; 3) the values of fitting parameters a and n differ significantly between the two groups; 4) while representing from sources is an extralinguistic phenomenon, it nevertheless reflects the similar quality of language (i.e. a human-driven complex adaptive system), and it also offers a better understanding of the quantitative features of this phenomenon. In summary, this study presents the results of several preliminary attempts to study a specific type of extralinguistic phenomenon from a quantitative perspective.