A scaling law of contextual persistence in human language

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.25184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human language exhibits lawful structure at the level of words (frequency, vocabulary growth) and word pairs (co-occurrence across distance). Here we show that the arrangement of words in sequence -- a central determinant of meaning -- obeys a comparable law. Using large language models as probabilistic probes, we measured the reduction in target perplexity conferred by prior context at distance d beyond that of the same words scrambled; this difference, the contextual persistence function P(d), isolates the influence of arrangement. Across ten corpora spanning six language families and written and spoken modalities, P(d) decayed approximately as 1/d ($P(d) \propto d^{-\alpha}$, mean $\alpha = 1.04$; median $r^2 = 0.96$). The effect vanished