🚨 New paper! 🚨 by Yoolim Kim, @helenamiton.bsky.social, Marc Allassonnière Tang, & myself, in Journal of Memory and Language. We tried to do for letter shapes what phonologists did for speech sounds. doi.org/10.1016/j.jm... A 🧵 (1/14) - ThreadSky

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oliviermorin.bsky.social • 8 days ago

🚨 New paper! 🚨 by Yoolim Kim, @helenamiton.bsky.social, Marc Allassonnière Tang, & myself, in Journal of Memory and Language. We tried to do for letter shapes what phonologists did for speech sounds. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2025.104620 A 🧵 (1/14)

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oliviermorin.bsky.social•8 days ago

To communicate, we need symbols (words, images, sounds ...) that are (1) numerous enough, so they can carry enough information, and (2) distinctive, so we can tell them apart. How do we get there? (2/14)

oliviermorin.bsky.social•8 days ago

One solution: Combinatoriality. Symbols are combinatorial when each re-use features present in other symbols, to form different combinations—as in this Sol LeWitt painting: (3/14)

oliviermorin.bsky.social•8 days ago

Is language combinatorial in this sense? Everyone pretty much agrees that it is. Especially phonemes — the sounds of languages. They are combinations of features (like open/close, front/back, nasalized/not nasalized etc.) (4/14)

oliviermorin.bsky.social•8 days ago

How about letter shapes? Writing systems all over the world also need many distinctive symbols to function, and combinatoriality is a good way to get there. Are letters as combinatorial as phonemes? (5/14)

oliviermorin.bsky.social•8 days ago

This is a harder question than it sounds; no one has tried to describe letter shapes like linguists describe phonemes — with a scientific toolkit that can describe any symbol from any language in a clear, unambiguous way. (6/14)

oliviermorin.bsky.social•8 days ago

So we decide to crowdsource this! Enter Glyph (2022–2024), a gaming applet that we built. 5,000+ people played with Glyph for free and for fun, contributing the data for this study. BIG thanks to them! (7/14)

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